How To Find Your Art Style & Evolve Your Style Too! (Copy)
If you’ve ever spent hours filling your blackbook with handstyles and throwies but still felt stuck, you’re not alone. Learning graffiti isn't just about repetition—it’s about intentional practice. In this graffiti tutorial, we’re going to break down five powerful tips to help you improve your graffiti faster by focusing on fundamentals, structure, and strategy.
1. Identify Your Weakest Graffiti Fundamental
Before you do anything else, take a step back and evaluate your work. Are your letter structures off? Is your negative space inconsistent? Are you struggling with flow or weight? Pinpoint your weakest fundamental and make that your focus. This targeted approach creates a “leapfrog” effect—every time you improve one weakness, your overall performance improves. Whether it's handstyles, throwies, or pieces, narrowing your focus accelerates your growth. In the piece above, the letters are E, F, F, Z, while the tag tells a different story as its letters are E, G, G, Z. This only happens when we’ve severely compromised our letter structure by adding style. In their case, they’d see this, and begin working on studying letter structure, then practicing the topic with zero style.
2. Think Out Loud While You Work
As you're practicing, verbalize your decisions—why you added that extension, how you balanced a curve, what you're unsure about. Turning automatic choices into conscious thought helps bring your artistic intuition into focus. Even if you don’t speak aloud, keeping your thought process at the front of your mind helps you identify what you do and don’t understand. This is where real graffiti learning happens. Its at this point where the artist who did this Emotion piece, would ask themselves, “do my structures make sense, do my extensions work, and hows my negative space? “ When asking these questions, you may not always have the answer, and if you find that you’re a bit lost, then that’s an indication that more studying needs to be done there. If you find that you have the right answer, then give it a try and see if it works. If it works, and you can factually prove the fundamentals are correct, then great, if not, then once again, more studying can be done there.
3. Study the Elements of Art
The most underrated graffiti tip? Study the elements of art. Most graffiti writers overlook this completely. But understanding things like line, shape, form, value, space, color, texture will give you the visual vocabulary needed to actually improve. Every letter relies on these foundational principles. Make time to learn and apply them.
4. Focus on One Letter at a Time
Art is a problem-solving process and graffiti is no different. If one letter is throwing you off—say, your “S” always looks awkward—then focus just on that letter. Dissect it. Try different structures, play with balance and spacing, and explore variations like a square-top “S” or round-top “S.” Just like a portrait artist who studies only eyes or lips, graffiti writers benefit from zooming in on the anatomy of a single letter.
5. Slow Down and Analyze Your Practice
It’s easy to fall into the trap of filling a page with 100 handstyles or throwies and calling it practice. But unless you slow down and analyze each one, you're just building muscle memory—not understanding graffiti. After each tag or throwie, pause. What did you do right? What didn’t work? Look for concrete answers like stem length, negative space, or letter proportions. That’s how you turn repetition into real graffiti progress.
Bonus Tips: Allow Mistakes and Practice Patience
Graffiti is often ego-driven. Many new writers avoid making mistakes and jump straight into wildstyle, trying to look good before they actually get good. But if you want to learn how to do graffiti for real, you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes and take time with the fundamentals. Growth comes from patience and humility.
Want to Take Your Graffiti to the Next Level?
If you’re serious about learning how to make graffiti for beginners and developing your style, check out our Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book. It’s the only book on the market that teaches graffiti fundamentals in immense detail, walking you through the process of creating your own unique style.
