45 minute Patterns Excercise

If you look through my school notebooks, binders and books throughout the years you'll see just about as many doodles, sketches and scribbles as notes. I've always been into street art style letter graphics. Every now and then I pick a few letters to string together in some graffiti style sketches. As my adopted artist name, Sane now appears on many of my free-time free-hands.

Wild Style is an intricate selection of colors, shapes, lines and shadows used in graffiti to produce visually stimulating pieces of art. It's like a dialect of written English, an self-taught cursive sort of speak, very much a cipher. Think tagger = padawan learner and graph artist piecing Wild Style = Jedi. I've been playing around with a archaic version of Wild Style more focused on using shapes and colors to obscure the text.

Here is the first



Wild Style is also the title of the landmark Hip - Hop culture film released in 1982. It chronicles a story of a graffiti artists named Zoro in turn of the 80's New York. Many have heard the title track of Wild Style as the intro to the seminal Nas album Illmatic but never caught that the sample was from Wild Style. It definitely serves equally as good a purpose introducing one of the most awe-striking 40 minutes of hip - hop you will ever hear. If you follow the link to the movie's website they actually have the clip from the opening scene posted with the Nas sample (navigate to the movie tab and its the third clip). This movie is also good for a interlude sample used by the Beastie Boys on Check Your Head proceeding the Maestro. The influence this movie had on other hip - hop artists doesn't stop there. I'll let you do some homework on your own.





When you watch this movie don't blame me for wanting to jump fences and climb steel girders.

Here 45 (technically 90) minute exercise number second (hint: relax your eyes). The point of this one was to draw all the interlocking empty z-shapes first and then fill them in. I'll do some time-lapse beginning, middle, end picts next time.

Really? Brew - Tang Clan

Wu - Tang Clan karaoke y'all. This past Saturday night at this spot called the Highbury in Bay View these local Milwaukee Hip - Hop heathens, using the moniker Brew - Tang Clan, played the Wu- Tang instrumentals for eager Wu - Imposters to bring the vocals to. One catch separated the real from the faulty... no lyrics on teleprompters. It was a nice touch for weeding out johnny come new Wu - enthusiasts.

Mostly ODB verses were recited... Shimmy Shimmy Ya and the Wu Forever track where ODB is screaming about sh*tting on lawns and rap souffle where requested. There was a notable rendition of the Raekwon overclassic Knuckleheadz that reminded that when you listen to that album you become invincible.

I was harassing the host to get the Liquid Swords track Duel of the Iron Mic and he came through. The DJ had to dig through the internet for that beat. I had to take my turn ripping a track. I only had the first verse down but people were definitely feeling it like the track just came out. Just goes to show some classic take time to mature. The host Dana Coppafeel actually turned out to be pretty cool. He's got his own music out and its worth of listen if your into indy Hip - Hop.

Next time it goes down I'm going to have an arsenal ready.