Graffiti Hand Style Tutorial Variant Structures

A topic that (at the time of writing this), has never been talked about is variant structures. Put simply, these are different ways that some letters are commonly written. Now these structures have to remain under a certain style threshold, and they have to be made using a few basic strokes (taught in the video above). What’s amazing about variant structures is that they take on new shapes, and as a result, this changes not only their structures, but it also changes their weight, and every other fundamental along with it. The whole point behind variant structures is they offer up new ways to approach a particular letter and as a result you can approach the whole name differently. We demonstrate all variant structures in our new book “The Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book” .

Say you have a name like “Bass”, these are all fairly round letters, but what if you wanted to do a more angular tag, throwie, or piece? Well, you variant structures let you use an alternate B, thats more pointed, along with a more angular lowecase A and angled S’s to go with it. Suddenly you’ve take a naturally rounded name and turned it into a very angled name just by using new structures. Now part of what makes variants so useful and easy to use is the fact they are categorized as base structures, meaning they flow with all other base structures automatically. This is important to note, as this means, you don’t have to worry about messing up your graffiti by using these. This gives you the freedom to do your graffiti hand style, throwies, or pieces how ever you please, and frees up your stylistic options.

Now flow is all well and good, but say you already have enough flow in your name and you want to add a bit of contrast, well variants let you do that too. We can see this in Easy’s tag here. He’s applied more than enough flow in this tag, so the square top A offers a nice bit of contrast to the letters as a whole, while not hurting flow. This is something you can do in your own work but be careful. Keep in mind #1 you have to build up excess flow , and #2 contrast is always at the expense of flow. See, although all base structures flow automatically, if you’ve too many contrasting letters, then you’ve decrease flow too much for this to work. Use your contrast sparingly, use it to bring attention to one or two letters depending on how long your name is.