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Highlights Est. 2001
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Deliveries everyday Shipping from 9 EUR 19 years experience
This guide is packed with tips for anyone who wants to learn graffiti! You will learn - step by step on how to make your very first graffiti painting. You will also get some tips and tricks to take your first steps towards mastering graffiti.
People have different opinions on what graffiti actually means. There’s the classic graffiti born out of the Hip Hop culture in the early 70s. It had many unwritten rules and norms. For a long time it was about letters, names, style and mystery surrounding the graffiti painters. How the letters are shaped, executed and placed has also been of great importance in graffiti culture. To the old graffiti writers the placement of the graffiti piece was a major part of painting, this was before legal walls, social media and the internet. Despite rules and norms, graffiti has always been a free art form where the writer decides how and where they want to perform and display their art, in this way graffiti has constantly developed.
A big influence historically has been where the graffiti comes from - a painting in the 90s in southern Spain could look very different to a painting from the same year in Los Angeles. Graffiti has been and is to some extent a very local subculture and has looked a little different everywhere in the world even though it was going on all over the world at about the same time. Despite this, something in common for graffiti everywhere in the world have been these norms and unwritten rules. You could divide graffiti into many subgroups today or you could lump together everything called spray art in a public place. Whether it's letters or other motifs made with spray, markers or a brush, it's up to everyone, maybe it's not that important either? What do we know? Today we're going to focus on traditional letter graffiti anyway! Art at its finest.
How does one proceed then? How do you get your own style? Like so many other things, it's about taking your time - it takes time to develop your own style. It is of course possible to imitate and be inspired by other painters. A wise person once said "Everybody steals ideas - it's just a matter of who manages to hide it best". Which brings us to a classic phenomenon in graffiti - “Biting". Biting is when a person copies something from another painter, it has been frowned upon to copy someone else. Today, it looks a little different considering the internet and the fact that everyone can see everyone's graffiti from anywhere in the world. But the fact remains within the graffiti culture that it can be taken as disrespectful to bite someone outright, i.e. copy a letter from another graffiti painter's work and especially if the style is unique.
To develop style one must practice the basics, therefore we have put together a small "How to" you can follow to get a handle on how to make a simple graffiti painting. We start with some so-called "Block letters" - simple graffiti letters without any quirks, we’ll give the letters some classic elements and will go through a couple of traditional steps to get the letters from sketch on paper to spray paint on a wall.
ALL steps below are just guidelines, there are endless ways to express yourself through graffiti. So think of this as an easy way to get started with the basics. Remember that norms and rules are meant to be broken! Using a spray can is the most fun if you dare to do something unexpected.
It is very common for graffiti painters to make a sketch before the actual spray painting starts. It certainly does not apply to everyone but is quite common, in this example we will use this sketch taken from the book Graffiti for Beginners.
There is a whole jungle of different caps that all work just as well, it's a matter of taste when it comes to caps. But there are some that are good to start with before you find what feels right for you. We will try a few different things for this purpose and use:
Montana Level 1, Montana Level 2, Original Cap, New York Fat Cap and finally a Montana Cans Standard Cap that comes with Montana BLACK. For the first outline we’ll use Original Cap, Montana Level 1 we will make the final lines with, level two for effects, New York Fat Cap and Montana Cans Standard Cap we’ll use to fill larger surfaces with.
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Are you curious about caps we have “Mix caps - 180-pack” for you to try and find your favorites.
We bring the sketch to the wall and position ourselves a good distance away from the wall, look at the sketch to see how it can fit on the wall before we start sketching. It is very easy to lose perspective when you are standing so close to the wall so backing up a few meters several times throughout the process makes the whole thing much easier!When you have thought about how you think the letters should be placed on the wall, start spraying the outlines for the first letter. It can be redone in case it goes wrong and you can always correct if the letters have become too thick or thin compared to eachother. We try sketching with the Original Cap, it gives a high pressure with a narrow and blurry beam.
Sometimes it can help to use several colors for the sketch to keep track of which line applies. Think of the sketching as if it were a pencil that can be erased and redone, it can take a little time to get it exactly how you want it.
Then it's outlined and ready, it's time to fill in the letters. We are gonna make a classic horizontal "fade-fill" that goes from dark at the bottom to lighter at the top. We start by filling the upper half of all the letters with the light color, we try to keep a straight line across all the letters in the middle. We fill in with New York Fat Cap. We start to fill in with the darker color at the bottom and up. When we reach the lighter color, we change the cap to "Level 2", angle the can up a little so that the beam hits the wall sideways and thus "fades" upwards towards and over the lighter color.
Nice! Now we are going to make a background before we do the lines. A classic in traditional graffiti is the cloud background, so for the sake of simplicity, we’ll do just that. Think in semi circles that go around the letters. It might be nice if the clouds don't go around the entire piece but maybe poke out here and there. Excellent! We fill in the clouds with Montana level 1 where it can be tight to access with a fat cap, then we change to "NYC Fat Cap" and fill in the larger areas. It is usually good to frame what you are going to fill with lines of the same color first.
Ok, this is the part most people would say takes the longest to master, and what can often go wrong - doing the lines.In this part, there is a lot of room to express yourself when you have learned to control the spray can. There are many different techniques when it comes to lines depending on how you want them to look, it can take time to learn.
Try to stand firmly on your feet and have good balance in your body. Try to drag the can along where the line should be before you spray, feel the balance. It might feel better to move a foot or two to the right, this will make you reach all the way away to the end of the line. It is to your advantage to draw the entire line until there is an angle or something else that is in the way, if you stop in the middle of a line it will be more difficult to make it look smooth.
We try pressing the cap in the air a few times, feel out the cap, put the spray can where the line should start, breathe in, breathe out, feel the peace.. and then we press the cap and drag the line to where it needs to go without hesitation. We are going from point A to point B one line at a time, not too slowly so that it drips, not too fast so it becomes faded. Draw the line with a definite movement from point A to B.
When the lines are in place, we put a small shadow on that is about three lines thick. The angle of the shadow is from the bottom left. again, first the lines then fill it in.
As a bonus - a highlight on the letters. Here you can choose white, or another lighter color that makes the letters pop out. The idea is to create the illusion that there is a light directed at the letters. You can use the same technique as when you made the lines. In this example, we draw the highlight so that it is about two rays away from the lines, the light comes from the top right and therefore we only draw the highlight on the top side and to the right of the letters.
Nice! We have made a simple graffiti painting. Let's do some icing on the cake - so-called "seconds'' that circles the letters and makes them pop out a little extra. Now it's just a matter of taking pictures and starting to think about what we should try next time! Maybe we should try to bend some beams, cut off somewhere, make completely shaky lines on purpose, ignore the highlight and do something else that makes the painting "pop" with the filling instead, make a very long 3d shadow.
Only the imagination sets the limits! Hope this guide can be of some help, now you can break all the rules. The hardest thing is to control the spray can and it can take time to learn. A classic expression in graffiti culture is "can control" and it is when you have mastered can control - the real game begins!
For more Tips & Guides about graffiti see “A Beginners Guide To Graffiti”, “Graffiti School: A Student Guide” och “Street Fonts”.
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Highlights Est. 2001
info@hlstore.com
Deliveries everyday Shipping from 9 EUR 19 years experience
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