DIY graffiti doesn’t have to be ugly– it can be thought-provoking, challenging, and perhaps most importantly, temporary. Jesse Graves, an artist based in Milwaukee Wisconsin, has harnessed mud as an artistic medium to take his green graffiti to the streets, and he encourages others to do the same.

Graves’ graffiti, which includes images of bicycles, bottles of oil, and cows, uses mud stencils to promote messages of social justice. Why mud? According to Graves, “I use mud or earth because it is a fundamental life-giving substance, logical for my messages.”

His process is simple — tape a stencil design behind transparent Mylar, cut the picture out with an X-Acto knife, tape the stencil to a surface, dab mud on the stencil with a sponge, and remove both the tape and the Mylar. It’s so simple, in fact, that budding graffiti artists should have no problem going out and plastering their cities with green messages. So what are you waiting for?

+ Mud Stencils