When he was still a little boy, Crotag’s father always played Iron Maiden albums in the car. As he grew up his love for the heavy metal band grew along with him. At age 15 he also fell in love with graffiti. Now he combines the two and it resulted in the most awesome graffiti pieces of Iron Maiden mascot Eddie.
“As a kid, I heard that one of the older neighbor kids ‘made a graffiti’ in the bike-tunnel near my house. I went down there to check it out and I saw in silver and red the word ‘NEX’ on the wall. It fascinated me. Since then, every time I sat in the back seat of the car I looked around for graffiti and I slowly started to get it. At school I started scribbling some letters, inspired by my surroundings. I was doing it so much the teachers started seeing it too, so I bought an Edding marker and moved my scribbling from the classroom to the wall”, Crotag explains how he got interested in graffiti.
After lots of practice he decided to paint an Eddie and he has been doing it since. The combination of graffiti and heavy metal isn’t one you see too often, but Crotag doesn’t care. He wants to be different from most graffiti artists and besides: “I’m a big Iron Maiden fan and Eddie is an icon to me. He’s an inspiration and I love the artwork. It’s satisfying to put a new Eddie somewhere. Luckily Iron Maiden has a lot of albums so I won’t run out of Eddie designs too quickly.”
His work has even been retweeted by the metal legends themselves: “There it was, my picture on the Iron Maiden Twitter page. It was something I never expected. I immediately made some awesome screenshots for my photo album.”
Crotags’ work can been seen all over the Netherlands, but mostly in the Utrecht area.
