3 Tips For Perfect Flow in Graffiti!
Graffiti is an exciting and fun art form but for those who are new, mastering the art form's intricacies can seem daunting. Our new tutorial on YouTube, "Graffiti's Beginner Guide To Flow", shines a light on one of graffiti's foundational elements: Flow. This blog post summarizes the video with 3 simple tips you can use to improve your flow in graffiti.
Tip #1 - Why Your Flow is BAD
The whole idea behind flow is to unify our letters and to bring a sense of cohesion to our name. Luckily for us, all base structures flow automatically without us needing to do anything. Since our name flows on it’s own, that means that we have to work to maintain our flow, rather than work to achieve flow. The issue is most new graffiti artists add far too much style without knowing the basics. When they do this, they make mistakes with other fundamentals and these mistakes erode their flow as a result. If your flow is ever bad, then look to your other fundamentals and fix them first before worrying about flow. Once these other mistakes are taken care of, your flow will be fixed as well. Here we have a N and E letter combo, and even though both letters are technically fundamentally correct, they still don’t flow. The reason for this is because they’re far too different than one another. This level of difference introduces too much contrast and destroys our flow.
Tip #2 Maximize Line Uniformity
Line uniformity is really going to act as the glue that holds your letters together. Whats great about line U/S is we can use this to push our flow even further to give our letters a greater sense of unity that will allow us a bit more freedom for contrast where we see fit. To maximize our flow we’ll want to position letters with a slight overlap. This overlap will allow our letters to have similar and uniform lines positioned well within range of one another allowing our flow to transmit from one line to the next with no issue at all. A solution like this is easy but it does come with a serious draw back, and that’s if we’re not careful then we might end up overlapping too much. If we do this then we’ll obscure a letter and diminish our flow. Be sure to stay on the look out for any bad overlaps.
Tip #3 - Letter Uniformity/Similarity
Ok ok let me say state this right from the start, part of the reason all letters flow automatically is because they innately share similarities in the strokes used to make them, meaning if you’re new to graffiti, you wont have to worry about this. However, if you want to play around with letter U/S then here’s a tip for you. Take a letter, and add one detail to it, it can be anything you want, an extension, serif, or maybe it’s the shape of the structure itself. Now, go to each letter and see where you can place your second detail. Be sure to draw it so that the second iteration looks similar to the first. Normally, if you have the detail on the left and right side of the name then you’re typically fine, but its a good idea to work your details in prime numbers as this helps balance the image. So, if you feel you need a third, then once again, go through each letter and place one more, and be sure to draw it similarly to the first two. Since Letter U/S considers flow of a larger scale, each repeating detail will have a huge impact on flow so you don’t need many repeating details.
In conclusion, if you’re struggling with flow then keep things simple and focus on your other basics first. If you’re more experienced then go ahead and give these tips a try when drawing some graffiti letters. Now, if you’re looking to find your graffiti style or evolve your graffiti style in general? Pick up our new E-Book that teaches each of graffiti’s fundamentals.
