Hand-cutting a stencil for a street mural usually means a blade, a steady hand, and days of work before a drop of paint goes up. Harry Bunce skips that part. When his stencil needs to cover a wall bigger than his studio, he sends the vector file to a laser cutter in Shoreditch and picks up the finished sections later.
From fashion textiles to rabbits and foxes
Bunce was born in 1967 and grew up in a small Hampshire village, the son of builders, according to his own artist biography. He studied fashion and textiles in Bristol and spent the next twenty years working inside the fashion industry, nowhere near a street wall.
The pivot happened in 2007, at a friend's fortieth birthday party. Asked how the art was going, by his own account he didn't have a real answer, and that was the push he needed to go back to it. His first pieces were portraits of rabbits, foxes, and other animals, styled like reimagined childhood heroes and villains, built to connect with an audience rather than impress a critic.
A print shop connection sharpens the edges
A working relationship with the screen-printing studio Screen One, which has also produced prints for Banksy and Nick Walker, pushed Bunce's paintings toward a harder, more graphic style, according to a gallery biography from Michael Murphy Gallery. The animals stayed. The line work got cleaner, more stencil-shaped, better suited to walls instead of just canvas. Collectors now describe the result as Beatrix Potter meeting Quentin Tarantino, and some call him rural Banksy, a nickname that undersells how specific his targets are.
That shift matters because Bunce isn't only a gallery painter anymore. He's rural Somerset's loudest defender of its own countryside, and the animals in his work carry that argument. He's contributed pieces to Greenpeace, Keep Britain Tidy, and the Big Egg Hunt over the past decade, each project running the same cast of rabbits and foxes through a different environmental cause.
Why a painter sends his stencils to a laser
Street murals don't scale the way canvases do. A stencil built by hand for a gallery wall doesn't necessarily hold up at the size a festival wall demands, and cutting one that big by hand would eat the week before an artist ever picks up a spray can. Bunce works with Swordfish Works, a laser cutting studio in London, specifically for pieces where a hand-cut stencil isn't practical.
For one of his largest pieces at Upfest, Europe's biggest street art and graffiti festival, Swordfish cut his stencil in four separate sections and shipped them to Bristol for him to assemble on site. The laser doesn't just save time. It holds detail a blade can lose over a long cut line, and it lets a single design scale from a print-sized sheet to a wall-sized panel without redrawing a thing.
The festival that keeps growing around him
Upfest has grown into a genuine institution. The 2026 edition ran from May 15 to 31, and organizers brought in as many as 300 artists to paint more than 120 large-scale murals across Bristol, according to Visit West. That's the scale Bunce is building stencils for now, a long way from the fashion studio he spent two decades in.
The tools have caught up with the ambition. A laser doesn't care if a stencil is four feet or forty. For anyone cutting their own stencils at home on a smaller scale, the same principle holds: a clean vector file and the right cutter get you detail a blade never will. TasteBueno's own Stencil Library runs on that same idea, hundreds of cut-ready halftone files built for exactly this kind of precision.
Bunce is still painting rabbits. He's just doing it at a scale that used to belong only to muralists who never touched a sewing pattern in their life.
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