MTN Australia Challenges the Australian Graffiti Community

4 min readAug 6, 2019

MTN Australia recently put a challenge out to the Australian graffiti and street art community. The response was overwhelming. With good reason, the prize pool was irresistible...

$14,000 in cash and prizes up for grabs and 2.5 months to complete your entry… pretty tempting right?

There was just one catch… you could only use Black and White. No greys, no transparents and absolutely no colour.

Days One kicks off the MTN Australia Competition

Split into 2 categories (Graffiti/Street Art), each category had 2 winners (1st and 2nd). First place would receive $2,000 cash and a year’s supply of black and white. 2nd would receive $1,000 cash and 6 months supply of black and white.

But why, for what??

Well, let’s take it back for a second.

We had an enormous amount of black and white due to an over order and decided to run a sale, passing savings on to the MTN Crew down under.

However, we needed a plan, something that would also involve our community. Also, we didn’t want another generic and standard competition. We wanted something that felt more communal, more challenging, something that would push artists to think more creatively.

Then it struck us… make it an Achromatic challenge.

Sid Tapia brings his Stevie Wonder inspired “SensOneder” black and white piece.

SensOneder by Sid Tapia — Achromatic Piece

If you haven’t worked it out already, Achromatic means “without colour”.

We believed creating a competition that exclusively uses black and white would open up the competition to be more accessible for everybody. It would create a set of limitations which would push artists to think outside of their usual styles and tricks and it would also assist us in moving our black and white cans.

What we weren’t expecting was the huge amount of engagement and involvement from the Aussie community.

Entries from complete newcomers all the way up to some of Australia’s pioneers and long standing veterans in the game were submitted. Understandably, $14K in prizes is a pretty big draw card.

In order to keep the competition reasonably balanced, we split the entries into 2 categories; GRAFFITI and STREET ART. We then invited a mixture of graffiti artists and street artists to assist in the judging process.

The invited judges included, Sophi Odling, Lisa King, Days One and Sid Tapia.

The judging criteria was broken down into 4 elements; Technique, Composition, Originality and Detail.

Each element scoring a maximum of 5 points from each judge and, the winning contestants would split the $14k prize pool between them.

A handful of the artists answered a few quick questions regarding their entries, click on an artist’s link to view their answers and images.

Click on the artist below to view their Answers and Images:

The full collection of entries can be viewed across our Instagram feed (@mtnaustralia ), or look through the hashtag #achromatic / #mtnaustralia

Questions:

Briefly introduce yourself and your art.
How did you come up with your Achromatic concept?
What challenges did you face and overcome with the limitations of only Black and White?
What techniques can you share about your process, did you find certain techniques helpful?
What is one thing/lesson you learned while doing the Achromatic challenge?
If you were to do it again, what would you do differently?

WINNERS: GRAFFITI CATEGORY

1st Place: MISTERY - @mistery973