How to Draw Graffiti

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French from jayfrenchstudios.com. Today I'm going to teach you how to draw a graffiti. Of course graffiti is usually done with spray thing and we don't endorse a vandalizing building but it's still a great art form. So most of graffiti revolves around words, so we're going to do, we're going to do a word. And the good thing to start out with this is just to draw and we're going to use a nickname. Let's say my nickname is Shatter. Just draw some letters, you can make them a little odd if you want to make the line on the H little high, and make the line on the A really well, and make the Ts in one part, but for most part, you're just drawing standard letters to begin with. I'm going to do the line on E really high too, maybe the same thing with the R going low. Now this are kind of close together, but that's okay for this. And then you outline them and that's when you start to get funky. Draw some dramatic curves, let's make the lower end to this a lot flatter, like that. We're going to put a curve to each of the them and we're going to carry that throughout the whole, the whole image. Some overlap is always good. Again, we're going to make this narrow, or like that angled and make it get wider, put some curve to the bottom of that. And you'll see that it's still legible although in graffiti, it's quite a gaiety get it to where you really can hardly read it anymore. And we're going to get this a weird angle and what you'll do is you need to go over this with ink. And we're going to make the T's, group together here or you can just erase your original pencil lines. We're going to put a little spike to the T's, to give them a more refine look, or you can just use this as a rough sketch and start over once you got your design sort of worked out, 'cause you can change things as you go and come up with something that's your personal style that looks really cool to you. And, okay, we're going to throw a little, makes into this and put the curl down here. You always want to overlap, I'm going to carry that spike over here as well. We're going to make this as R down look like a blade, and add some fun. Here, we actually actually have the curl on the inside. From there you can get a lot more of the graffiti look by shading one side, put some dimensionality to it. Let's say your light source is coming from over here, top right slightly to the front, clear out the way too much of the front here and just generally, and there's no right way to do this. There's always some interpretation, depending on, you know, of course in reality will depend on the lightness and the closeness of the light source. But, as to where exactly would be shaded and wouldn't, especially on curves, but from here, it start to get more of a graffiti look with dimensionality. Now another thing that you can do is you can go in and add some details like cracks, crumbling and if you want to give some texture to your letters, you'll see this in a lot of graffiti art, do some search on the web; find some graffiti art references and you'll find what you like best and which style you want to mimic the most. And that is the essence of doing graffiti."