Stickers play such a crucial, yet underrated, part in our society. To kids, they are a fanciful array of loveable characters to collect. For scrapbookers, they add embellishment, give voice or draw detail. In the office, labels adorn the backs and fronts of envelopes and many a post-it (a mild variation of the sticker) adorns a computer screen. In the big wide world, our cars are a haven for stickers, from the bumper to our licenses to the dreaded death knell of the yellow sticker. But to the street artist, the sticker is just another tool of the trade.

Just as the paste-up can be laboured over at home and then self-made or professionally produced, so can the sticker. The difference with the sticker, though, is that if professionally made, production costs can soar. Small glossy stickers are incredibly durable (The Yok still has stickers around town that have been there for four years now) but such durability comes at quite an expensive price. Homemade stickers are far more affordable. Prices for these can range from a roll of office labels to buying a scrapbooking sticker making machine for just under $40. The cost saved at home, however, are soon funnelled into production time.

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When it comes to the streets, stickers face two degrees of durability: the weather and removal. Homemade stickers often fade fast. Glossy ones are more prone to be quickly spotted and easily removed, particularly since glossy stickers are the easiest form of sticker to peel off.

‘It’s the same as everything that goes up without consent,’ points out street artist aficionado Twenty Eleven, whose stickers appear here alongside Creepy’s. ‘If it’s a good spot they stay if not they get peeled or weathered or bloggers steal them for their scrapbooks. It’s all about getting them high, but then I’m scared of heights.’

The sticker perhaps affords the greatest economy of time once on the streets. There is nothing easier – and more surreptitious – then walking along and slapping a lamppost or window with the palm of your hand and having applied a sticker. Of course, as Twenty Eleven points out, height is everything. It is here, then, that the challenge in using stickers presents itself. Perhaps combining stickers with the performative street art of urban gymnastics parkour would be of benefit? But that’s for a future column.

In the meantime, the sticker is anything but. With so many roles already played in society, it’s not surprise that stickers have now been adopted by street artists. After all, regardless of the degree of production costs involved in creating a sticker, the time stickers save on the street is a bonus. How high one places them though is just a matter of how brave one is.

OUTinPerth does not condone or promote the use of illegal stickers.