By 1993, I had been writing for a couple years and hadn’t really made a whole lot of progress. This was the year I first started hanging out with the newly formed MSK crew and was put on a few months later. At the time I got in, the crew was very small, it was Eklipse, Gank (Gkae), Fate, Havok, Saber, Gone, and Baba.
Gank was my mentor and shared a great deal of knowledge about the graffiti game. He schooled me on the rules, the crews, other writers, how to carry myself, etc. Eklipse was also a mentor to us. He gave me letters to learn from. It was a sheet of paper with some styles drawn in ballpoint pen. This sheet of paper and some guidance took me further in a couple months than the previous couple years.
Mentors and proximity to people excelling in their field can fast track your progress if you implement what you learn. I found the same thing in business. In 2020 I joined the Arete Syndicate with mentorship from Andy Frisella and Ed Mylett. It’s been close to three years of learning from them and being in proximity to other entrepreneurs that are pushing themselves to be better. I’ve learned more about business and leadership in the last three years than I did the first seventeen years in business.
If you’re getting started in graffiti, business, or just about any area, a good mentor can greatly shorten the timeline of your progress. On the other side, if you’re experienced, you can really help fast track the growth of those that are just coming up.
4 comments
S4ZA
agree 1000 percent. Mentors are such amazing insights and shortcuts having digested, tried and experimented to weed out what wont work.
Rickie Won
Big respects to you and your crew!
Josh Stjohn
The paragraph about having a good mentor to start from is on point as u get. I started off writing And was a worthless toy headed nowhere. I was up though. One night one of the cities most respected writer’s rolled up on me as I was about to hit this wall right on the side of the street. He mentioned himself and it was hard for me to believe it was him anyways from there on we became friends and he brought out the best in me. And of course I learned the basics of how a letter is drawn and many styles to learn from. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be who I am today can’t really say that’s a good thing or a bad thing since graffiti pretty much f***** my record up with the law. But in the long run I don’t think I would go back and change a thing, actually I got lucky and I guess it must have been my destiny even though I really don’t believe in that s***.
Ian Skelton
Yo Bus!
Love the article and the topic of having a mentor. Back in the mid 90s I briefly did graff as a teen but I never really got into it more deeply like I wish I did. I grew up in Memphis,TN and there wasn’t much of a graff scene back then. Maybe because of that and not having a mentor led me to not to pursue graffiti more in my teens.
Throughout the years I would just draw graffiti in my sketchbook and on stickers, but I never really got into the fundamentals. I just turned 40 and this past year I’ve gotten more serious about graffiti and decided to pursue it more within my art. I recently joined a crew out here in San Diego and one of the homies is my mentor.
He helps me out with the fundamentals of graff and gives me tips about spray paint, can control, caps, etc. I’m glad to have to a mentor and to have inspiration from other artists. It definitely helps me to grow as an artist and hopefully to become a better graffiti writer in the future.
– Ian