Today’s purveyor of urban graffiti art could well be tomorrow’s groundbreaking artist, as evidenced by Banksy’s move towards gallery shows — which would be welcome news to anyone who has spent hours trying to wash these artists’ illegal daubs off their walls. Stencil Revolution (“collectively reconstructing the urban canvas”) offers proof of the growing sophistication of graffiti.

Dismissing visions of amateurish pre-teen art class students cutting up bits of card, the Tutorials section demonstrates how to create a basic stencil or transform a colour photo using a single-layered stencil and Photoshop.

The Profiles section has artist interviews and impressive examples of their work. The Q&A sessions with figures such as haha, “Melbourne’s most prolific stencilist”, are the complete opposite of pretentious art analysis — “I realised my robots were not going to take over the world so I made stencils of robots. In the future people will live for ever as cyborgs.”

There is also a forum, fonts to download and links to numerous other sites. Among the promised features is an “EPS Exchange”, which will allow “artists to preview and download stencil designs uploaded by other artists”.

Banksy’s own official site is a calculated and seductive online operation. Reynolds-like portraiture splattered with custard pies and riot police with smiley faces are displayed alongside his numerous press cuttings. The attendant public appetite for his work suggests that Banksy’s clever stencil art is now part of the mainstream cultural landscape.

It looks as though this particular wave of the future has already crashed upon us.

www.stencilrevolution.com www.banksy.co.uk