Old school graffiti starts with a tag.
Graffiti culture reached its heights in the 1980s with the explosion of hip hop culture. Fueled by music and movies, images of New York Street culture traveled around the world. Today, graffiti has made its mark in graphic design, photography, advertising, fine art, and walls around the world. Modern graffiti wall art has evolved to incorporate some stenciling unlike old school graffiti artists, whose work is purely freehand.
Instructions
Working on Paper
1. Sketch a classic background--a brick wall--in pencil. Keep the bricks symmetrical and evenly shaped. Adding cracks creates an aged feel.
2. Use markers in grays and earth tones as coloring for the bricks so that your letters stand out. Additional shading and highlights can help the bricks look distinct.
3. Sketch your tag using bubble letters. Bubble letters are easy to read and create and serve as the starting point for every new graffiti artist. All letters are lower case. Put a lot of thought into your tag, it's your name and symbol that will be your signature.
4. Draw with a distinct circular motion from the wrist in creating the letters. They overlap, but are not connected. 3-D effects can be added at this stage by adding shadows in black behind the letters.
5. Use three colors when filling in your piece: outline, fill, and glow. Since the letters are fat, there is room to add extra writing or symbols of significance once the fill color has been applied.
6. Only ink the outline in black marker once you are happy with the entire piece. Once it's been outlined, erase all the pencil sketch marks.
