What can an adult do with a sticker, you might ask. Chris Powers and Patrick Ayres – who do screen printing and vinyl cutting at Chris Powers Print and Design Team in Monterey – decided to prank their friend, Nile Estep.
“We print all day so we can do art all night,” Powers says. “We made this big decal Wonder Woman and underneath it says: ‘Do you think I look pretty?’ We attached [Estep’s] Instagram handle.” One can still admire the decal near a Starbucks in Monterey.
“In this day and age, it’s easy for people to make stickers,” Powers continues. He has been making stickers for fun for years; now he is passing that part of the business on to Ayres, and Powers will be sticking to screen printing. “Cricut cutter machines have made [sticker making] really open to anyone who has $200,” Powers says.
But many of those stickers will not last six months, says another local sticker maker, Zarosh Eggleston, who works from Carmel Valley. He has been working in what Powers describes as the right way – not digitally but by hand, using actual ink which results in bold designs, juicy colors and products that can last for years, even in the elements.
Eggleston talks about the history of mass-produced commercial arts, Andy Warhol screen prints from the ’60s, sticker wars he witnessed in San Diego, works by street artist Shepard Fairey and his friend, local painter Andrew Jackson. Its early ancestor is a bumper sticker, and bumper stickers were bigger once, Eggleston recalls. “They were ridiculous stickers,” he says. “Everybody had them… They are cheap, you can just grab them and they remind you where you have been.”
Stickers are everywhere there are surfaces: on street signs, lamp posts and bike racks. Some of them are like tags; they mark territory. Artists put their art on stickers, selling their work in a less expensive form. Many sticker enthusiasts keep collections; Powers has a whole box of them. But outside of a box or drawer, what can you really do with a sticker? Sometimes you just see a perfect spot, Powers says.
“You will ask yourself, what is it and why the hell is it up there, and you will likely look it up,” Powers says. “It’s almost like a game.”
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