Graffiti in Art

Graffiti is one of the few art forms that almost everyone sees every day and that almost nobody knows much about. Between a tag scribbled next to a railway line and a fully composed wildstyle piece lie worlds — in craft as much as in design.

In this article we look at where graffiti comes from, which styles there are and how to draw your first own lettering. On paper, because that is where all of it starts anyway.

What Is Graffiti?

At its core, graffiti is lettering art. A name or a short signature sits at the centre, and the actual creative work lies in shaping, interlocking and decorating that name until it becomes a picture in its own right.

That is what sets graffiti apart from street art, where pictorial motifs come first. Put briefly: graffiti is about who, street art about what. In practice the two scenes overlap, but their roots are different.

The word itself comes from the Italian graffiare, to scratch. Originally it meant inscriptions carved into a surface — the oldest surviving examples are in Pompeii, where people scratched insults, declarations of love and advertising into house walls around two thousand years ago. The urge to write your own name on a wall is clearly very old.

The History of Modern Graffiti

The graffiti we mean today emerged in the United States at the end of the 1960s. In Philadelphia, writers like Cornbread drew attention with their name tags, and shortly afterwards the centre of the movement shifted to New York.

There, in 1971, a messenger named Demetrius became famous for leaving his name all over the city as TAKI 183. An article about him in the New York Times set off a wave: suddenly hundreds of teenagers wanted to see their name everywhere.

Over the following years, New York’s subway trains became the most important canvas of all. Because the trains ran through the entire city, a name spread faster than it ever could on a wall. Simple tags grew into ever larger, more colourful and more complex forms, until whole cars were painted.

In the 1980s, graffiti reached Europe through films, music and magazines. At the same time, transit authorities began to crack down hard on the paintings — a conflict that continues to this day.

The Most Important Graffiti Styles

Tag

The tag is the simplest and quickest form: the signature, usually written in a single colour with a marker or a can. It is the foundation of everything else. A good tag lives from its swing, from the rhythm of the letters and from confident line work — exactly what you train when sketching.

Throw-Up

A throw-up consists of two or three letters in thick, usually rounded outlines, often with just one fill colour. It is a compromise between speed and visibility.

Piece

Short for masterpiece. A piece is a fully worked-out lettering with outline, fill, gradients, highlights, shadows and often a background. Every design tool that applies elsewhere in art comes into play here: composition, colour contrast and light and shadow.

Blockbuster

Large, blocky letters, usually in two colours, laid out for maximum readability from a distance.

Wildstyle

The most complex form: the letters are interlocked, twisted and fitted with arrows and connections until the lettering becomes practically unreadable to outsiders. Reading wildstyle is a skill of its own — and that is exactly the point.

3D Style

Here the letters leave the flat surface entirely and are constructed as solid bodies in space. Without a solid understanding of perspective, this style does not work.

Drawing Graffiti Step by Step

Every good piece starts on paper. Professionals fill entire blackbooks with sketches before they touch a single can. Here is how to go about it:

1. Choose a Short Word

Four to five letters are ideal. Fewer quickly looks empty, more becomes cluttered. Pay attention to the mix: letters with round shapes (O, S, C) and letters with straight edges (E, T, K) together make a more interesting image than a group of only one kind.

2. Write the Word Out Normally First

It sounds banal, but it is the most important step. Write your word in simple block letters with plenty of space between them. This basic shape determines the rhythm of the whole lettering — and mistakes in the basic shape cannot be fixed later.

3. Give the Letters Volume

Now thicken the lines. Don’t think in strokes, think in bodies: every letter is a shape with width. Make sure the thickness stays reasonably consistent across all the letters, otherwise the word looks restless.

4. Distort and Connect

This is where it gets interesting. Tilt individual letters, stretch them, let them overlap each other. Connect neighbouring letters through shared edges or small bridges. What matters is that the lettering as a whole gets a direction — usually a slight diagonal.

5. Add Serifs and Arrows

The little extensions, spikes and arrows at the ends of the letters are what make a lettering come alive. Use them sparingly, and always in a way that supports the reading direction.

6. Draw the Outline

Trace the complete lettering with a clean line of even thickness. Take your time with it — the outline decides the overall impression more than any detail on the inside.

7. Fill and Shade

Finally come the fill, the gradient, the drop shadow and the highlights. A drop shadow works best when you decide on one light direction and stick to it consistently. Set highlights sparingly, on the edges that face the light.

Supplies for Getting Started

You need surprisingly little at the beginning:

• Paper and a pencil for the sketches. A sketchbook is entirely enough.
• An eraser, because the first steps involve a lot of correcting.
• Markers in two or three widths for outline and fill. Alcohol markers work well because they layer cleanly.
• Spray cans and caps, optionally, once you move to a legal wall. Different caps produce different line widths — a fat cap for surfaces, a skinny cap for outlines.

What Is Allowed and What Isn’t

To be clear: painting walls, trains or signs that belong to someone else, without permission, is a criminal offence. How good the result looks makes no difference, and neither does the wall having been derelict beforehand.

• United Kingdom. Unauthorised graffiti is criminal damage under section 1 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971. It carries a fine and, in serious cases, up to ten years in prison; most small-scale cases end in a fine, a community order and a bill for the cleaning. On top of that, selling aerosol paint to anyone under 16 is an offence under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003.
• United States. Penalties are set by each state and usually fall under vandalism or criminal mischief — typically a misdemeanour, and a felony once the damage exceeds a certain value. New York has a dedicated offence, “making graffiti” (Penal Law § 145.60), a class A misdemeanour. New York City also bans the sale of spray cans and broad-tipped markers to anyone under 21, and their possession on someone else’s property (Administrative Code § 10-117).
• Everywhere. Trains, stations and other transit property are prosecuted far more harshly than a random wall, and listed or historic buildings even more so. Cleaning costs are usually charged to the writer on top of the penalty.

The good news is that there are plenty of legal options:

• Free walls and halls of fame. Many cities set aside surfaces that anyone may paint — London’s Leake Street Tunnel under Waterloo Station is the best-known example in the UK, and the Graffiti Hall of Fame in East Harlem in the US. The map at legal-walls.net lists thousands of spots worldwide.
• Your own surfaces, such as a garage door, a garden wall or an old sheet of plywood.
• Commissions from cafés, clubs, youth centres or property managers.
• Paper, canvas and blackbook — where most of the actual development happens anyway.

And Then?

Graffiti rewards repetition like almost no other discipline. Drawing the same four letters fifty times sounds boring, but it is exactly the path along which a personal style develops — much like the drawing exercises that move you forward in every other discipline.

And if you then find yourself drawn to pictorial motifs in public space rather than lettering, the article on street art is the natural next step.