Story

The story behind Earl Lube Paste-  the premier multi-media artist’s paste- traces back to Earl Lee, the mysteriously sexy daredevil character whose fictional tongue-in cheek snake oil "Earl Lube" drove a phenomenally popular street art campaign across Southern California.

Though Earl’s handsome, all-American mug and magically stimulating lube are not real, the namesake artist paste that glued his myth onto the walls of Los Angeles is.…

After bombing Earl Lee’s iconic image and lube “cans” across the city for nearly a decade, Earl’s loyal following and swelling legend inspired the man that created him to craft the best artist paste possible. The goal: to make a product that would help his art ride the longest or in street parlance... "stay up longer".

At the time, the wheat pastes most artists had available to them or made themselves were neither good, nor really meant for outdoor use, and they would make your art "crispy" and quickly disintegrate, ruining the colors and imagery altogether. Determined to make something better, the mastermind behind Earl Lee teamed up with a paste chemist to find solutions to these universal problems. Together, they researched compounds for their own recipe, eventually replacing 98% of the “secret ingredients” most artists used at the time with eleven of the finest ingredients made by well know manufactures from around the world. In the end, they formulated an entirely unique product- a handmade, water-based, non-toxic, UV resistant artist paste that dries crystal clear to a water-fast, matte finish.  A Street Paste... if you will.

Years after his initial debut, the fictional, lady-killing Earl, whose story had taken on a life of its own, became the face of a sensationally real product: Earl Lube Paste.

Though initially designed as a replacement for the wheat paste used to adhere art to walls of varying surface types for the street art scene, Earl Lube Paste serves a number of other functions and artistic mediums today. The ability to use it indoor and outdoors gives it a home among a number of niches, including collage, decoupage, papier-mâché, acrylic pouring and even acrylic painting, as a gesso-like surface sealant for wood and canvas. Since the paste is an acrylic polymer it also effectively prevents the yellowing, fading, and deterioration of color and has an endless and as yet, undiscovered myriad of uses. From fine art galleries to movie studios, artists and crafters everywhere cherish the one-of-a-kind, color-preserving paste. The once sought-after Earl Lube Paste, which was made and sold exclusively to artists across America through word of mouth for nearly a decade, is now available commercially as an essential product for every creative’s toolbox.