How to Draw Graffiti Names

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French, from Jay French Studios.com. Today I'm going to teach you how to draw graffiti names. Now, of course, there's a infinite number of styles with graffiti, but we're going to go with...we're going to with one here just to show you some basics. Most of it is about names, so I'm going to use my nickname, Shatter. And, I'm going to do this a little taller and thinner. Just draw some basic letters to start with. You can draw it really lightly, go back and erase it later. Or if you go over it in ink, then you can more easily erase the letters. And once you've got your general arrangement, then you can get crazy with it. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to do every other letter big, every other letter small. And you can get really wild. We're going to make this sort of look serrated. It's always hard to draw a curve against your hand, so if you move the page around, it'll work with your body better. And I'm just going to do about four letters here. Feel free to get your proportions, your angles, all of 'em odd, because graffiti is all about expression. So, then we'll have a big A. We're going to go with that serrated thing again. And you can see this is, you know, of course, a real rough...you'll refine it .... like I said, in ink, or just using your eraser. Okay. Now a lot of what... and I'm going to go ahead and erase the inner lines because I'm going to put a little color on here. A lot of what graffiti is about is about color. You don't ever see a whole lot of black and white graffiti. So we're going to do a little bit of a two tone, a fade. Now graffiti's usually done with spray paint, but you'll see it in all manner of mediums, really. Most of it is made to mimic. If it's not in spray paint, it's made to mimic spray paint. So, what we'll have here is a fade, which will look like a spray fade. I have a dark yellow going on there. I actually need to fade that out more. Now this is not always the case. You don't have to use fades, even in a lot of graffiti styles you will see set lines, hard lines. One of the things you can do in colored pencil, is you can actually go through with a white blending, or a blending pencil to get more smoothness. That one came out a little rough, but it gives the impression of the spray paint feel, which is the very modernistic look that is the signature to graffiti style. And especially with names, when you're....you want to really be expressive as to what you're trying to get across because this is your name, or a name that has an emotional attachment, so you want....you want a feel behind it. And you can go through, and add details such as highlights. I would actually go through with, perhaps some paint, or something more solid to give that more of a white. Or I would've just left the white area. And I can go through here with, like, usually just use...you can use black. In fact, feel free to use plenty of black, again, it's dramatic, harsh, which you want for this type of look. We're going to put a shaded area there. I'm using a dark red just to accent that, but then I would go through, and I would go in with the black, I'm just going to use pencil for now, and add some dimensionality to it as if the letters were actually thick. And add some depth. And this way you'll get a really cool look to graffiti names."