Art with the hand still in it.
Top and Dope is a studio for original, hand-painted art rooted in graffiti and built from real materials. Only a limited number of pieces leave the studio each year. Each one is thought through from the base layer to the finish, and there will never be a second.
From the base layer to the finish.
Every original is built by hand. Alongside oil, acrylic, POSCA, graphite, oxidation and raw texture we use mineral paints, enamels for exterior and interior work, siloxane paints and other professional-grade materials. The layers go on until the surface earns its place on a wall.
What you receive is the original object: the marks, the depth and the small imperfections a reproduction cannot hold. If an original is not for you right now, our art prints carry the same image at a more accessible price.
I learned to paint on walls.
Before the studio there was graffiti. I painted as TASH, and also as NEAR, SUTE, SNUR and RYDE. I never settled on a single name: each one belonged to its own period and style. I painted on abandoned factory walls, legal walls and wooden park panels, in summer heat and at −15°C. That is where I learned what paint does on concrete, brick and wood, how chrome is read on a letter and how a neon glow is built up from a dark base.
Then I moved to another country and spent more than five years out of the game, while the ideas kept piling up. At the end of 2025 I started turning them into finished works in my studio in Wrocław, Poland. It is the same studio where we develop ZUBRA COLORS, our own decorative paints for the home, shipped worldwide.
In the Journal I write about it first-hand: painting chrome letters, how the neon glow is made, how lettering gets volume and how a wildstyle sketch is built.
One of one
Every work is a single original. Once it has found its owner, no second version of it will ever be painted.
Mixed by design
Graffiti, abstraction and texture, on canvas, wood, paper and banner fabric. The surface is chosen for the work.
Colour you can’t print
We work with rare, hard-to-source paints and mix tones by hand for each piece. Many of these colours cannot be matched in print or on a screen, so a work always looks deeper in person than in its photo.
From spray can to old Italian methods
Fades, outlines and spray control from graffiti, combined with layering and finishing methods from traditional Italian decorative craft.
Restoration grade
Many works use top-level Italian restoration materials, the kind that keep historic facades intact for decades. Their names stay in the studio. What you see is the result.
Time in every piece
From the concept to the choice of ground, materials, tools and colours, each work takes one to four weeks.
Large works, shipped rolled.
Some of our largest works are painted on banner fabric and travel rolled, without stretcher bars. A rolled work crosses Europe safely and costs far less to insure and deliver than a crated canvas of the same size.
We know you want to hang it the day it arrives. It can hang as a banner straight away, or a local framer can stretch or frame it in a few days. Ask us before you order and we will help you plan it.
Priced close to cost.
Right now the price of a work comes close to what it costs us to make it: the materials plus the weeks of work that go into it. We chose this while the studio builds its first circle of collectors.
As the collection grows, prices will rise. Buying now means owning an original at its earliest price.
Alexander Yashyn
Alexander's first training was in the restoration of buildings and architectural monuments. He went on to study industrial and civil engineering at university, and graffiti came along with him through those years, whenever there was time and a free wall.
For years he worked in decorative wall finishing. That experience became the foundation for his own collections of decorative paints, and today he co-runs the company that produces them. He continues to train under an Italian master restorer with more than 30 years of work on historic buildings and monuments, who inherited his craft in Venetian plaster and decorative finishes from several generations of masters before him.
This is what sits beneath every work: a practical understanding of how materials bond, age and hold up over decades. It goes into each piece, from the first layer to the last.
