Tagged The Inside Of A Bank!
A good friend of mine Shaun gave me some awesome footage of him going through an abandoned PNC Bank and holy crap the graffiti was amazing. If you’d like to watch the video on youtube you can check it out here, "How To Do Graffiti Pieces (Full Breakdown)”, but do be sure to check out Shauns video too.
As Shaun made his way to the second floor we are greeted to a nice tag at the top of the stairs. The tag says Olde Town and instantly it stood out to me as having a Philly influence. Now it turns out this bank is in PA after all, but that doesnt confirm that the person who did the tag is from PA, it simply makes it extremely likely. Now the reason this made me think it was a Philly writer is due to the tight letter name positioning, with the narrow lettering, and the clean hair pin turns. Alone these features aren’t enough to indicate anything, but all together in one tag, it begins to point at that Philly aesthetic we all know.
From there we moved over to the next piece in the bank, this time it was from a really talented writer Gems! This was an amazing piece by gems and his fill in was pretty awesome! Check out the pink fill in, with hints of purple inside. This is placed on blue 3D with the whole piece outlined in a nice apple green. These are colors that go amazingly together but the impressive part is how saturated most of the colors are, and how the values aren’t too different . The reason thats impressive is due to the lack of contrast with the colors. Normally, lacking contrast means that your different elements (fill, outline and 3D) will bleed into one another, but he’s careful to stylize the fill and 3D very differently from one another. On top of that, the 3D is largely blocked in most areas, and both of these elements come together to make the letters the focus despite the lack of contrast.
Now my favorite piece here was from Smae, this guy was a monster on the walls! His piece begins with a small S that overlaps the M a fair bit. The A becomes slightly larger than the M, and then the E is massive as it takes up the rest of the space the wall has to offer. Smae’s fill in works amazingly with contrast as one color overlaps a totally different color to ensure structures are clear to see. This kind of color composition allows Smae to add even more detail and allows him to exxagurate structure more since he can still retain the letter through contrast.
Now if you’d like your graffiti to get to this same level as Smae and Gems then check out our brand new book The Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book Part 1-Fundamentals where you’ll learn all of graffiti’s basics in an easy-to-follow book. By the end of it, you’ll fully understand how to find your style, and how to keep progressing for the rest of your graffiti journey.
