Graffiti Hand Style Tutorial / Tips.
Want to know how to improve your graffiti hand styles, thats going to be what we do here today! Over on instagram I had you guys shoot your work my way for a bit of a rating / critique. While the ratings are a bit of a fun, the critiques are where the meat of the information is. I want to look at a tag from one of the featured works in here and give a few additional tips so everyone can learn just a little more about letters.
Lets have a look at the Pace submission, we covered his piece in the video so I’d like to talk about his tag a little more. In the video we pointed out how they aren’t really aligning the basic boxes too effectively, and we can actually see the reason for this in the tag. A graffiti artist’s tag shows their true understanding of the fundamentals and more times than not, the issues in tags will carry over to all other forms of graffiti. Pace added plenty of style the hand style over all while still keeping the structure pretty straight forward and this is certainly a good thing. However, they didn’t consider the effect is of style on the fundamentals. For example, the size of the “P” causes an overlap of the “A”. The “A” being really small, with the “C” right on top of it causes the “A” to lose weight and a little bit of structure since the “C” covers the intersection of the lower portion of the “A”. The “C” and “E” has a sloppy unrefined shape to it’s structure. This is especially telling of how much they study the elements of art. Lastly, “R”, one of the most heavy letters in the alphabet has less weight than just about all other letters in the name despite the fact that it has an extension on the end of it. Now let me be clear, none of this means the hand style is so bad to where the letters are demolished, rather, it’s just to say that these mistakes add up, and these mistakes show us what fundamentals they still have to learn.
If you really want a graffiti hand style tutorial, or a graffiti tutorial for beginners then check out our new book “The Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book”. This will teach you all of graffiti’s fundamentals. We also have this playlist here on Youtube.
By learning about negative space, they’ll position their letters in a more cohesive and refined way that lets the letters have enough room to build structure. When they refine their shapes, their structure will become emboldened and weigh our properly. In the same way mistakes build up, these small lessons will do the same and a domino effect of positivity will begin to take place. As their hand style becomes more refined, they will see how their letters should look and act, and this information will carry over to their pieces as well. When you’re practicing, try to keep the tag nice and simple, without any style. This is going to help you figgure out your core issues that you need to practice.
Try a few tags like this and examine each. Look for mistakes such as letter structure issues, letters that are too far or too close, negative spaces in individual letters that are too large or too small, things of this nature. Once you’ve spotted these issues, be sure to study those topics, then give the tag another try using the information you’ve learned in the videos above, or from our new book. In this grand tag, you can see the lower portion of the “R” is obscured by the “G” and as a result, we lose structure in both letters. This is a letter positioning issue since each letter is structurally well written if we’re to isolate them. Something similar happens with the “A”, “N”. Our intersection where the crossbar of the A meets the right line is overlapped by the “N”, resulting in the blue area being cut off of the “A”. examining mistakes like these, and taking the steps to fix them is how we gain an understanding of our letters and it’s how we improve as graffiti artists.
