3 Tips Guide - Letter Name Positioning!
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 Toys Don't Know This - Letter Name Positioning Tutorial," shines a light on one of graffiti's foundational elements: letter name positioning. This blog post summarizes the video with 5 simple tips you can use to improve your letter name positioning in graffiti.
Tip #1 - Basic Positioning
If we had to sum up this technique, we can say, that the positioning of your letters will come together to make the positioning of the overall word. Your goal is to make sure your letters are close enough to make a name, yet have enough space to let each letter breathe. This brings us to our first tip, introduce a tiny overlap with your letters. Doing this increases flow between letters, while also keeping all of your structures intact. Doing this is simple enough, however, it’s also very easy to overdo this and mess your graffiti up. This Soke tag shows what happens when you position letters badly. The O and K are too far and decrease flow, while the K and E are too close and begin to obscure one another. Try starting out with modest overlaps, and as you become more comfortable you can introduce larger overlaps.
Tip #2 Bad Possitioning = Bad Weight
How you position your letters can influence your image weight and your letter/name weight. This all about context though so let’s say you have a name that goes straight across, but one letter jumps up off the baseline, this letter will create a void of space underneath it. This extra space will create a greater sense of weight for that letter, and this can throw off your graffiti. Now don’t get me wrong, as with all things, this can be used for style but this is no easy task for the new artist. Try keeping all of your letters level with one another, and keep them the same height so that they can encompass the same amount of space.
Tip #3 - Positioning Builds Flow!
One of the best parts of Letter/Name Positioning is it’s ability to build immense amounts of flow. This applies to all forms of graffiti so be sure to take advantage of it. Try and take two different lines, from different letters that are similar, and position them close to one another. For new artists, this normally means moving the letters left and right, but more advanced artists can lean, or move up and down to increase flow as well. This can be risky since you’ll be influencing the relationships from one letter to the next, and all the fundamentals along with that.
In conclusion, new artists will find success with modest adjustments, and as you learn this fundamental more and more, you’ll be able to make larger changes with ease. If you find this to be hard to do, then other fundamentals are likely the issue, and backtracking through the basics will help iron out those issues. 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.
