Graffiti Art Progression Guide

Nobody wants to get united. Like what we gotta do is meet everybody in a hall. 49th Street at the bench. Hey guys, welcome back to the artist block I'm John Grimm and I've been teaching art as well as graffiti for nearly 20 years and today I'm going to show you guys how to make the progress in graffiti that you've been chasing after along the way I'm also gonna give you guys different practices that you can do based on your skill level now all the information in today's video is gonna Be 100% applicable to hand styles, throwys and pieces. We have to understand the whole theory and concept behind progression You see progression comes in two parts you have studying and you have practice studying is when we're gathering new credible information We're learning more about the funda- fundamentals. Now practice is when we sit down and we exercise that very same information that we just learned about. So now the question becomes, hey John, what are the fundamentals? Well the fundamentals that apply to every single art form, no matter the art form you do, is the elements of art. And this is where the majority of every single artist's skill, knowledge, and progress is going to come from. You have to study and you have to practice this. No matter how skilled you might be, no artist is above practicing this topic. So that's going to be line, shape, form, value, space. color, texture. From there, you're going to also want to study Graffiti's Fundamentals, which we actually made a whole playlist of tutorials teaching you that exact thing, and we even published a book you can find in the description down below. It'll teach you everything you need to know about Graffiti's Fundamentals. Once you've done a bit of studying, now we can get into the books and begin practicing. So, we're going to start here with our letter R. And no, I'm not talking about this big one right here. We're talking about that tiny one up there in the top left. So, this is really important. What also really helps, and something I recommend amateur and intermediate graffiti artists definitely do is draw your cap line, base line, and mean line, and write down the name you wanna do in graffiti or the word you wanna do in graffiti as neatly as humanly possible, like basic print font. Zero style, just like we did with the R here. And the reason for this is because that's gonna act as our reference, as our guide, for our hand-styled stories and pieces, as this will tell us how the letter's actually built and where it aligns on our three lines here. So. we can see for example the stem of the R reaches from the baseline to the cap line just like we have right here. Then from there it begins to go horizontally at first before it begins to arc downwards towards the mean line. The bowl connects back to the stem at the mean line. line and then from there it shoots back to the baseline at a 45 degree ish angle. Now what's also really important here is we can analyze a little bit deeper. We can look at this and say all right well how far does that leg actually reach? We could draw a dot on the apex of our bowl and then drag that line straight down down to the baseline and draw another dot and what do you know the leg of the R touches that second dot and if we do the same thing over here on our basic piece you get the same exact result so having that basic print tag at the top is a great way to keep yourself in line and a great thing to reference back to if you're still getting comfortable with the fundamentals now something that's really important to note with my basic boxes is we want to keep the width of the different parts of the letter very consistent you'll see that the stem of the R is a similar width to this part of the bowl and the leg in general now it It does get bull. around the apex of the bowl and that's pretty common to see in graffiti so don't worry too much about that getting a bit wider. Now if you make any mistakes because we are practicing we will be making mistakes and that's actually kind of good. When you do make those mistakes you can analyze what the mistake is. You can look back and say ah you know what maybe my R actually came back a little bit too far this way or maybe you went too far out and it doesn't look right. I know it doesn't look right because it doesn't look like our little reference over here. But now we can do something pretty interesting here, right? As you can see, our stem is here in red, and this one's a pretty good proportion. This is our standard lettered proportion for the size that we're working with. But if we come over here, we notice that the stem is thinner. And it's still fundamentally correct. The R still functions well and good, but when we thin down our structure this way, how does that affect the other fundamentals? Let's have a look at it. So we look here, and we notice that, alright, the closed counter suddenly has a lot more negative space. Not only that, but we check out this area over here, and we see this also has a lot more negative space. However, this area doesn't get too much more negative space, only very slightly, but not much at all. Now, all this negative space means that our letter structure doesn't have as much visual weight. It's a little bit lighter, and it might be perceived as a little bit weaker as well, especially if your other letters are much thicker than this thinner one. Now, let's go ahead and bulk this guy up, put some meat on his bones, and what do we notice? Well, now we have a much smaller closed counter, and much less negative space in this area. A lot... less negative space here in this counter as well. So we begin to see how very small changes like in the width here begin to have massive effect on other fundamentals. This is the kind of stuff that we want to begin to analyze when doing our basic studies. Now we can take this information that we just dissected and we can say all right Does that apply to throwies? And try it out on throwies. We could also apply it to hand styles and say, what happens if I go ahead and I do the very same letter R with a thicker nib? Granted, this is a chisel tip, so it's a little bit of a different shape, but you get the point. You can try things out and then analyze how it fundamentally functions. Now, something that we're going to want to keep in mind, especially for those guys who are brand new to graffiti, we definitely want to keep our basic boxes as clean and as refined as possible. This is more so applicable to throwies and pieces because hand styles, it's a mono line, right? You're going to get one uniform line. And you're perfectly fine to go but for throwies and pieces you really want to make sure that this line right here aligns perfectly with this line right here, which we can see doesn't happen on our F. If we take this line and we drag it up, it doesn't align with what we have over here. So we really want to make sure that our basic boxes and our letter structures in general really align for our throwies and our pieces as well. Now if you've studied the fundamentals, you understand how lines connect to one another, and you also understand how your basic boxes connect, because they connect in much the same way. When it comes to our basic boxes, we want to connect on one vertex like we see right here. or two vertices. We can connect different parts of our letter at different angles. For example, here we had the R extend down at a 45 degree angle for the leg of the R. But what happens if we take this leg and we put it at a slightly shallower angle? Now when we connect at that shallow of an angle, we decrease the amount of negative space in this counter here, while increasing the amount of negative space over here. Now this increased negative space also adds a bunch of weight because there's nothing holding up the right hand side of the R anymore. So even though we didn't change anything with the bowl, the bowl begins to have a lot of weight. Once we do that, we can ask ourselves, alright, well how do we fix this problem? Well one obvious solution is to put the leg back to where it was, right? Connect it back at a 45 degree angle, back to where we started, and you're good to go. But there's also a different solution. We might be able to go ahead and just shrink the bowl down ever so slightly. That way, it's proportioned to the leg once again, minimizing the amount of negative space, minimizing its reach outwards to the right-hand side, and as a result, minimizing the overall weight on the right-hand side of the arm. If you're intermediate or advanced, those are the kinds of things that you'd want to begin to analyze. If you're an amateur, you still don't yet know the fundamentals. So our objective for you is going to be to gain an understanding of how these things function. Learn more about each fundamental and try to make your work fundamentally correct. That's the level you're trying to get to. That's the bar you're trying to reach. is having your work be fundamentally correct. Once again, your goal would be more so to achieve the proper basic structure to begin with. I want to address the ZE here, which is a great practice for negative space management and letter name positioning, which if you're advanced or you're intermediate, you guys should be doing this consistently. Now, I think it's a great idea for amateurs to go ahead and practice your basic letter name positioning and negative space management simultaneously. This can easily be done by moving a letter left to right and not really focusing on anything else. Make sure everything reaches. where it's supposed to on the baseline, mean line, cap line. And then, once you get one letter fundamentally correct, try and do a slight overlap like we did here with the ZE, where you can maintain the fundamental integrity. And see if you can get that right consistently. Now there's something else that we can do with our basic boxes as well, right? We can also taper them. Make them wider on one side and thinner. on the other. Now to be fair this isn't really something I recommend amateur graffiti artists to do as it's going to cause us to change the basic letter structure a little bit which is going to alter other fundamentals. But let's take a look at how this might look for intermediate and advanced graffiti artists. So we have our M here and as you can see each basic box connects to one another on their vertex and vertices and that's working out all well and good. But we decide you know what maybe we want to taper some stuff maybe we want to make some fundamental changes and see how that affects the letter. Well we go ahead and we decide that we want to taper the top left basic box of of the end so we go ahead we draw a line here And then we get wider at the bottom this line right here of the M isn't matching up with the vertice over here So now suddenly we have to go ahead and thin down our second basic box We also decide you know what maybe we don't want that second basic box in order to reach all the way down to the baseline Instead we want it to reach down to the mean line So we go ahead and we stop it at the mean line this also is going to change the angle that the third basic box has to go ahead and connect to. So we do the same thing over here and for the fourth basic box we realize you know what we kind of have to taper this as well because we did it on the left hand side and we want a little bit of uniformity there. So we go ahead and we taper this side of the M and we realize you know what we're kind of chopping into the negative space over here. and I want a bit more negative space. How can I go ahead and achieve that? These are the things you want to be thinking about when altering fundamentals. So maybe you decide that you want to change the angle of the terminal. Instead of having a perfectly horizontal top, you want a bit of an angle to it. Now what this does is it brings the right-hand line over here a little bit higher, so we can shoot out further to the side, and then we can shoot this out further to the right as well. And look at that. Both of these are fundamentally correct, but you can see what altering the fundamentals does. And having an understanding and a knowledge of how fundamentals interact with one another can lead you down different paths for style. But keep in mind, this is practice. Our objective isn't to have an Instagram-ready piece that we're gonna go ahead and post, or a perfect hand style that we're gonna use from here on out, or a perfect throwy that we're gonna use from here on out. We're doing this to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals. That way we can apply it to the hand style that we actually wanna use, and the throwy we wanna use, and the pieces we wanna do on walls and in the books. All right, so now for some basic practices for amateurs, intermediate graffiti artists, and advanced graffiti artists. Starting with amateur graffiti artists, you're really going to wanna prioritize was impressed. practice having a consistent width for each basic box that makes up a letter. And as a result, a consistent width throughout your entire piece or throwing. You're also going to want to practice having... consistent fundamentally correct angles for each of your basic boxes as well. This way you'll gain a better understanding of the actual letter structure and how that letter structure functions and how its negative space and its letter name weight are created as a result of that letter structure. If you're an intermediate graffiti artist I recommend practicing doing your letters at different sizes if you're doing a hand style. If you're doing a throwy or a piece try tapering your boxes Like we did here with our M. And for your hand, solstice, throwies, and piece, change the angle that different basic boxes connect at. Similarly to what we did on the R. See and analyze how that affects different fundamentals. Now as you're changing the angle different things connect in for your hand, solstice, throwies, and pieces, try and keep it fundamentally correct. Don't try and push the letter to the point where it breaks until you can connect things at unorthodox angles properly, consistently. Once you can... then attempt to break the letter to see where that limitation lies. For advanced graffiti artists on your hand styles, do letters at different sizes. Maybe one letter, instead of going from the baseline to the cap line, it goes from the baseline to the ascender, which is a little space right above the cap line. Or maybe a second or third letter goes from the cap line all the way down to the descender, which is the area right below the baseline. Try playing around with that. That's applicable to your hand styles, throwies, as well as your pieces. But also for your throwies and pieces specifically, try doing different sections of your letter at different widths. Maybe your stem is really skinny and your bowl is real fat, with another really skinny leg. Mix things up in this way and analyze its fundamental effects. The goal here should be to have consistency throughout the entire name, and for it to be fundamentally correct. And then, do all that again, but with varying structures that you typically don't use. Now, because this is meant to be a practice, you will fail if you're doing the practice properly. And the reason for this is because, well, you're still learning, you're still progressing, right? So, when you do fail, you want to be able to analyze what went wrong, the same way when we had the shallower leg of the R with the wider bowl, we were able to see, alright, we have a lot more negative space on this side with nothing to carry the positive space above it. That's the fundamental reason as to why that failed. So you want to be able to dissect stuff like that and pick up on those. If you find that you can't come to those kind of conclusions, then you need to do more studying. Keep in mind... We're not looking for a photo finish here. We're looking just to analyze the fundamental effects. So if it's ugly, that's perfectly fine Lastly for your hand styles, stories and pieces connect your basic boxes in very unorthodox ways in order to try and see where the letter Breaks that's the objective here. We're trying to break the letter, but don't rush to break the letter try and slowly Change things until it breaks that way you can find out where that limitation is now. I move to letter name positioning This is a really Really fun fundamental because you can change quite a bit about a letter even though you're not changing the letter itself You'll notice that we have a standard are here Nothing is different about this are then our very first are we did initially the only thing we did was we kicked that guy on Over to his side and now he's leaning a bit to the left So what fundamentals does this affect and how well we can immediately see now we have a lot more negative space in this area over Here and we definitely changed negative space in this area over here That's something that would have to worry about in a hand style throw your piece But notice that the yard still keeping its balance somewhat and that's because of all the weight from the bowl on this side. That's got a lot of weight there so it's able to lean over to the left quite a bit before it really falls over to its side. On top of that we also have the leg of the yard that's loaning some of its weight as well in order to help keep it balanced. Now the questions become for amateurs can I do this consistently and keep it fundamentally correct? For most amateurs the answer is gonna be no because you're still learning how to make your initial structures and how to position them properly to manage your weight in negative space. So this might end up causing a lot of issues for amateurs. For intermediate and advanced graffiti artists, the answer is going to be yes. You should be able to do something like this. But the question you then want to ask yourself is, alright, well how much of this leg can we chop off before we begin to really knock this thing off balance? And how much more of the leg can we add in order to help add more weight so it doesn't even begin to look off balance to begin with? Then from there, how do the changes to the letter structure, making it longer or shorter, how does that affect the negative space as well? And the letter positioning of... neighboring letters. Because obviously if I have this far of a leg outwards, well then it's going to be hard for another letter to nudge up close. Though an advanced graffiti artist might see an opportunity to raise a letter higher. If I make the leg shorter, well that makes it easier for letters to nudge up close, which can help. to compensate for some of the weight and help to rebalance the R. Then you'd ask yourself, how does that affect the fundamentals? But let's not go too far down a rabbit hole, all right? I think that's a pretty good example there. So from there, we move over to letter name positioning and letter name weight. We did the same piece here two times, basic straight letter, nothing fancy. And you'll notice we raised the O roughly to the mean line. Of course, you're going to want to ask yourself, what fundamental effects does this have, right? I feel like that's going to be pretty consistent throughout this video. And over here, we went ahead and did the same exact letters, right? Nothing has changed with the letters. They're pretty much identical. But this time we covered up up the O. Well that's a letter positioning issue that we'd want to go ahead and analyze. We'd want to go ahead and look at that and go, all right, what did that affect? We positioned the letters too close together. Now how is that changing things as far as the other fundamentals are concerned? Well we can see if we draw the rest of the O, we immediately notice how much of this structure we're missing out on over here on the right hand side. That structure that we need to see, that structure that develops the O's, well, structure. And because we lost out on all that portion for the O, we also diminished the O's weight. The O looks like it's hiding behind the other letters and that's not what we want. We want that O to show through. So you're going to look at this and you're going to say, all right, well, how do we go ahead and fix that? We realize that this is a negative space management letter name positioning issue. We position the letters too closely, which ate away at the O's letter structure, also diminished negative space, and that results in a diminished weight. for the letter O as well. So as a result of that, we can go ahead and fix this by nudging the N over to the right-hand side. By changing its letter position, we get to show more of the O, and we have more negative space to help develop the O's structure here, on the bottom especially, and in the closed counter, because we were missing just a sliver over here. Now the question we have to ask ourselves is, how do we want these letters to overlap? If we look here, we can see that this line of the S goes on top... of the O, which means that we're not going to be able to see this portion of the structure. We'll ask ourselves, how does that fundamentally affect the letter? Is that getting rid of too much structure? The answer is no. We can still clearly make out the letter if we get rid of this piece right here, and it doesn't really look like it's hiding. So now we draw the other portion of the O that we're missing, and we draw the N, and we contemplate, all right, if we have the N cover the O, well, we're eating away at a lot of structure once again, and it's bringing us really close to where we had the issue over here. We're trying to avoid that, and as a result of that, we're going to want to go ahead and overlap the O on top of the N, because this maintains the end structure we're not really obscuring anything you can still very clearly make out the end and you can clearly make out the O as well. All is right in the world and now we understand those fundamentals and the relationship a little bit better. Now for intermediate graffiti artists I really recommend that you practice messing around with your mean line because the mean line dictates so much about our letters when you move that mean line higher or lower it's going to change your negative space and your weight distribution throughout a letter. This is gonna cause a lot of problems expect to fail and that's completely alright that's kind of the objective for intermediate and advanced for 3D artists. Keep in mind, we're not trying to have a photo finish here so it's okay to be a little ugly. Make small adjustments to your mean line at first to keep the changes very minimal. As you get better at doing that try and increase the changes to your mean line because this will drastically change your letters once again. As you get better go ahead and take that mean line and push it further and further. At some point you're going to break the letter and once again you just discovered more limitations that you can take into future sketches, hand styles, and throwys. Keep in mind throughout this you're keeping your baseline and cap line exactly where they're meant to be. You're not changing those at all whatsoever. Now Now for advanced graffiti art. This one's gonna be a little difficult. Use multiple bass lines, mean lines, or cap lines for a singular hand style throw of your piece. If you want to establish multiple of any of those three lines, you'll have to have multiple letters abide by each set of lines. So if you have two mean lines, let's say you have a four letter name. two of your letters will abide by one mean line, and two of your letters will abide by the other mean line. When doing this, try to keep things as fundamentally correct as possible. It should be pretty difficult, especially if you don't already do this in your style. If you're really advanced and you find that too easy, in addition to that practice, angle and change your baseline, because your baseline has a massive impact on your name as a whole. While doing that, try to keep things fundamentally correct as well. Now we're changing things up, moving over to this throwy here, but can you guys spot the mistakes I included in this throwy? Pause the video if you need to, because I'm about to point them out right here, But the very first one is going to be the overlap between the A and the W. That's gonna be something that we want to address here. From there we have this little nudge that happens at the bottom of the A. Next up we have this little bump on the A as well and then we have the drop shadow on the P as well as just the P in general. When you're doing your graffiti of any kind, in this case we did a throwy, you really want to analyze the different qualities of your graffiti. In this case, I'm seeing the W and the A, and I'm seeing how close they got, I'm seeing how they overlapped, and how these lines specifically interact with one another. And I begin to look at it, and I say, you know, that is a lot of lines bunched up really closely together. If we look at the positive space in our throw, we don't... have a lot of clutter. This right here is clutter. It's an eyesore. It's not good. We want to get rid of that. So I think to myself, what letter do I want to overlap? Which one? And in this case, I would choose the W personally. So I would go ahead and make this a solid bold line and get rid of at least this vertical part, if not the vertical and the horizontal section. From there, we move on over to the little bump at the bottom of the A, and that's simple line and shape issue, two of the elements of art. Remember, you do want to be studying your elements of art, no matter how advanced you are. That's where the majority of your skill, knowledge, and progress is going to come from. So if I were to make a mistake like that, I would think about that and say, you know, I have to study and practice more of line and shape because lines make your shapes and shapes make your letter. So the cleaner your lines, the cleaner your shapes, and the cleaner your letter is going to be. From here we have this little bump on the A and while it fits the A, it's fundamentally correct on the A, it doesn't happen anywhere else on this throwy. If you have any elements on your graffiti, whether it's a hand style throwy or a piece, look to see if you can include that somewhere else. You want things like this to happen at least two times, if not more. More is, you know, definitely going to help out. It's going to definitely be better. And in some cases, you might actually need it to be more. Now, I don't really like the idea of putting this bump anywhere else on any of these other letters. So I would actually go ahead and remove this. Next up, the drop shadow on the P. Looking at this, it's going in the complete opposite direction of all of our other drop shadow. As a result, I'd want to go ahead and study value and form because these two together are going to teach me about lighting and how shadows function. which in turn will teach me about drop shadows. Lastly, the P as a whole. While the P is perfectly fine, it works better for a different throwy entirely, and sometimes this is true of our hand styles and pieces as well. We do a really nice letter that we're proud of, and it doesn't really fit the overall graffiti, so we're better off keeping that design for something else, and instead replacing it with something that works a little more for the overall cohesion. So, seeing this, I would think to myself, alright, let's do a couple more P's here, and personally what I- What I'd like to do is I would start by drawing the general shape of the neighboring letter. Now, the P is the last letter here, so I don't have to do one to the right, but... Instead we have the S here to the left. So I would just draw the general shape of the S We don't need any details. We don't need to do anything crazy That way we can get a basic idea of how it would fit to the neighboring letter I think I'd like a little part of the P right here and then to shoot up for a bit of a spike and then come Downward to finish off in a more typical manner. Once I do that, I go ahead and say, you know I'm not a fan of that negative space that gets created between the S and the P. That's gotta go It doesn't happen anywhere else really. Not to mention the fact none of our letters really have that pointy top Once again something that doesn't flow too well Maybe we can come up with something that looks a little bit more like what we we have. So you'd look at your hand style, throw in peace, you'd see the qualities that you have around your graffiti, and then you'd implement those qualities into the thing you're trying to adjust. So we have this serif happening on the S. We have a similar thing going on on the A. Let's do something similar, but not exactly the same, on the P. We come up with that little square. It also fills that negative space, which is really good. We then come back up, and we notice a much more rounded square shape at the tops of our letters. So let's go ahead and replicate that for the top left of the P over here, and then get real round over here on the right hand side for the bowl, to reflect that S and the bottom of the W and other sections of the letters as well, like the A. From there... We'd look at our W and we'd say, all right, we have this kick that comes out to the right and we have the same thing on the A now that we got rid of that little bump. Let's go ahead and incorporate that on the P as well. And we're all well and good. From there, we can make smaller adjustments and say, yeah, all right, these things happened at the mean line. So let me go ahead and establish this on the mean line. Keep in mind, we're not actually performing the throwy here. We're just analyzing and learning from our mistake. Now we can go ahead and take these changes and actually implement them into the throwy as a whole. Overlaps. Your letters encompass space. And we can visualize this space by drawing a little square around the letter. letter as a whole. You'll see these green areas mark the negative space that our letter leaves behind. It also shows us the general width that the letter inhabits. We want to keep this width consistent. We talked about this at the very beginning of the tutorial, but we also want to overlap. So if we simply just took this width and we drew another box that was roughly the same width, we'd come out all the way over here. However, we really wouldn't have any overlap. So how do we overlap? and keep that width consistent. Well, all we have to do is just draw these two widths slightly overlapping while keeping them consistent. And we'd see that, all right, our letter would extend about that far. Now, if we went ahead and did the A, we'd end up with a little something like that. And now our letters go well together. They fit pretty nicely. Now, you can change a lot about your hand styles, throwies, and pieces with a simple switch, that being changing the shape. You can see here we have pretty rounded shapes, like our W is pretty rounded here on the bottom. Well, what happens if we were to go ahead and say for example, come to a slightly pointier bottom. And now we have a little bit more of a triangular look to our W. If we did the A in much the same fashion and every subsequent letter, by the end of it, our throwing would look very different. It's a nice easy way to go ahead and make subtle changes to your letters. And once again, this works for all forms of graffiti. Now these different shapes encompass different amounts of positive space and they leave behind different amounts of negative space. So, if you're intermediate or advanced, you'd want to look at that leftover space that we have, and you'd want to analyze the fundamental effects of that, because that could change your letter positioning as well, and it's almost certainly going to change your letter name weight. Now, that's going to be generally how you want to practice. It's essentially a process of studying and learning new things, predominantly about the elements of art, that's where the majority of your skill, knowledge, and progress is going to come from, even in graffiti, and then practicing that stuff that you just studied. For beginners, no matter the art form you're working in, you want to achieve... the actual fundamental first. You're not trying to push anything, you're not trying to exaggerate anything, you're just trying to achieve a fundamentally correct whatever it is you're studying. Whether it's letters, line shape form, value space, color texture, anatomy, expressions, whatever the case is. For intermediate artists, your goal is to not only achieve the fundamental consistently, but to also push it to see how far you can, but also to push it to see where that breaking point is. And for advanced artists, your goal is to once again learn more information, study that information, and achieve that consistently, but also to get a better understanding of different fundamental relationships and to gain an understanding of the limitations for each of those fundamentals and their relationships and this is the process of how you do that this process works for every art form now if you really want to study graffitis fundamentals we have the only book on the market that teaches you each one of the frees basics in the description down below and we also have the best how to do graffiti playlists right over here with more content YouTube thinks you'll enjoy right down here as always I want to thank guys for watching I'll catch you guys back here next week

Nobody wants to get united. Like what we gotta do is meet everybody in a hall. 49th Street at the bench.

Hey guys, welcome back to the artist block I'm John Grimm and I've been teaching art as well as graffiti for nearly 20 years and today I'm going to show you guys how to make the progress in graffiti that you've been chasing after along the way I'm also gonna give you guys different practices that you can do based on your skill level now all the information in today's video is gonna Be 100% applicable to hand styles, throwys and pieces. We have to understand the whole theory and concept behind progression You see progression comes in two parts you have studying and you have practice studying is when we're gathering new credible information We're learning more about the funda- fundamentals. Now practice is when we sit down and we exercise that very same information that we just learned about.

So now the question becomes, hey John, what are the fundamentals? Well the fundamentals that apply to every single art form, no matter the art form you do, is the elements of art. And this is where the majority of every single artist's skill, knowledge, and progress is going to come from.

You have to study and you have to practice this. No matter how skilled you might be, no artist is above practicing this topic. So that's going to be line, shape, form, value, space.

color, texture. From there, you're going to also want to study Graffiti's Fundamentals, which we actually made a whole playlist of tutorials teaching you that exact thing, and we even published a book you can find in the description down below. It'll teach you everything you need to know about Graffiti's Fundamentals. Once you've done a bit of studying, now we can get into the books and begin practicing.

So, we're going to start here with our letter R. And no, I'm not talking about this big one right here. We're talking about that tiny one up there in the top left.

So, this is really important. What also really helps, and something I recommend amateur and intermediate graffiti artists definitely do is draw your cap line, base line, and mean line, and write down the name you wanna do in graffiti or the word you wanna do in graffiti as neatly as humanly possible, like basic print font. Zero style, just like we did with the R here. And the reason for this is because that's gonna act as our reference, as our guide, for our hand-styled stories and pieces, as this will tell us how the letter's actually built and where it aligns on our three lines here.

So. we can see for example the stem of the R reaches from the baseline to the cap line just like we have right here. Then from there it begins to go horizontally at first before it begins to arc downwards towards the mean line.

The bowl connects back to the stem at the mean line. line and then from there it shoots back to the baseline at a 45 degree ish angle. Now what's also really important here is we can analyze a little bit deeper.

We can look at this and say all right well how far does that leg actually reach? We could draw a dot on the apex of our bowl and then drag that line straight down down to the baseline and draw another dot and what do you know the leg of the R touches that second dot and if we do the same thing over here on our basic piece you get the same exact result so having that basic print tag at the top is a great way to keep yourself in line and a great thing to reference back to if you're still getting comfortable with the fundamentals now something that's really important to note with my basic boxes is we want to keep the width of the different parts of the letter very consistent you'll see that the stem of the R is a similar width to this part of the bowl and the leg in general now it It does get bull. around the apex of the bowl and that's pretty common to see in graffiti so don't worry too much about that getting a bit wider.

Now if you make any mistakes because we are practicing we will be making mistakes and that's actually kind of good. When you do make those mistakes you can analyze what the mistake is. You can look back and say ah you know what maybe my R actually came back a little bit too far this way or maybe you went too far out and it doesn't look right. I know it doesn't look right because it doesn't look like our little reference over here.

But now we can do something pretty interesting here, right? As you can see, our stem is here in red, and this one's a pretty good proportion. This is our standard lettered proportion for the size that we're working with. But if we come over here, we notice that the stem is thinner. And it's still fundamentally correct.

The R still functions well and good, but when we thin down our structure this way, how does that affect the other fundamentals? Let's have a look at it. So we look here, and we notice that, alright, the closed counter suddenly has a lot more negative space.

Not only that, but we check out this area over here, and we see this also has a lot more negative space. However, this area doesn't get too much more negative space, only very slightly, but not much at all. Now, all this negative space means that our letter structure doesn't have as much visual weight. It's a little bit lighter, and it might be perceived as a little bit weaker as well, especially if your other letters are much thicker than this thinner one. Now, let's go ahead and bulk this guy up, put some meat on his bones, and what do we notice?

Well, now we have a much smaller closed counter, and much less negative space in this area. A lot... less negative space here in this counter as well.

So we begin to see how very small changes like in the width here begin to have massive effect on other fundamentals. This is the kind of stuff that we want to begin to analyze when doing our basic studies. Now we can take this information that we just dissected and we can say all right Does that apply to throwies?

And try it out on throwies. We could also apply it to hand styles and say, what happens if I go ahead and I do the very same letter R with a thicker nib? Granted, this is a chisel tip, so it's a little bit of a different shape, but you get the point. You can try things out and then analyze how it fundamentally functions. Now, something that we're going to want to keep in mind, especially for those guys who are brand new to graffiti, we definitely want to keep our basic boxes as clean and as refined as possible.

This is more so applicable to throwies and pieces because hand styles, it's a mono line, right? You're going to get one uniform line. And you're perfectly fine to go but for throwies and pieces you really want to make sure that this line right here aligns perfectly with this line right here, which we can see doesn't happen on our F. If we take this line and we drag it up, it doesn't align with what we have over here. So we really want to make sure that our basic boxes and our letter structures in general really align for our throwies and our pieces as well.

Now if you've studied the fundamentals, you understand how lines connect to one another, and you also understand how your basic boxes connect, because they connect in much the same way. When it comes to our basic boxes, we want to connect on one vertex like we see right here. or two vertices.

We can connect different parts of our letter at different angles. For example, here we had the R extend down at a 45 degree angle for the leg of the R. But what happens if we take this leg and we put it at a slightly shallower angle? Now when we connect at that shallow of an angle, we decrease the amount of negative space in this counter here, while increasing the amount of negative space over here. Now this increased negative space also adds a bunch of weight because there's nothing holding up the right hand side of the R anymore.

So even though we didn't change anything with the bowl, the bowl begins to have a lot of weight. Once we do that, we can ask ourselves, alright, well how do we fix this problem? Well one obvious solution is to put the leg back to where it was, right?

Connect it back at a 45 degree angle, back to where we started, and you're good to go. But there's also a different solution. We might be able to go ahead and just shrink the bowl down ever so slightly.

That way, it's proportioned to the leg once again, minimizing the amount of negative space, minimizing its reach outwards to the right-hand side, and as a result, minimizing the overall weight on the right-hand side of the arm. If you're intermediate or advanced, those are the kinds of things that you'd want to begin to analyze. If you're an amateur, you still don't yet know the fundamentals.

So our objective for you is going to be to gain an understanding of how these things function. Learn more about each fundamental and try to make your work fundamentally correct. That's the level you're trying to get to. That's the bar you're trying to reach. is having your work be fundamentally correct.

Once again, your goal would be more so to achieve the proper basic structure to begin with. I want to address the ZE here, which is a great practice for negative space management and letter name positioning, which if you're advanced or you're intermediate, you guys should be doing this consistently. Now, I think it's a great idea for amateurs to go ahead and practice your basic letter name positioning and negative space management simultaneously. This can easily be done by moving a letter left to right and not really focusing on anything else. Make sure everything reaches.

where it's supposed to on the baseline, mean line, cap line. And then, once you get one letter fundamentally correct, try and do a slight overlap like we did here with the ZE, where you can maintain the fundamental integrity. And see if you can get that right consistently. Now there's something else that we can do with our basic boxes as well, right? We can also taper them.

Make them wider on one side and thinner. on the other. Now to be fair this isn't really something I recommend amateur graffiti artists to do as it's going to cause us to change the basic letter structure a little bit which is going to alter other fundamentals.

But let's take a look at how this might look for intermediate and advanced graffiti artists. So we have our M here and as you can see each basic box connects to one another on their vertex and vertices and that's working out all well and good. But we decide you know what maybe we want to taper some stuff maybe we want to make some fundamental changes and see how that affects the letter. Well we go ahead and we decide that we want to taper the top left basic box of of the end so we go ahead we draw a line here And then we get wider at the bottom this line right here of the M isn't matching up with the vertice over here So now suddenly we have to go ahead and thin down our second basic box We also decide you know what maybe we don't want that second basic box in order to reach all the way down to the baseline Instead we want it to reach down to the mean line So we go ahead and we stop it at the mean line this also is going to change the angle that the third basic box has to go ahead and connect to.

So we do the same thing over here and for the fourth basic box we realize you know what we kind of have to taper this as well because we did it on the left hand side and we want a little bit of uniformity there. So we go ahead and we taper this side of the M and we realize you know what we're kind of chopping into the negative space over here. and I want a bit more negative space.

How can I go ahead and achieve that? These are the things you want to be thinking about when altering fundamentals. So maybe you decide that you want to change the angle of the terminal.

Instead of having a perfectly horizontal top, you want a bit of an angle to it. Now what this does is it brings the right-hand line over here a little bit higher, so we can shoot out further to the side, and then we can shoot this out further to the right as well. And look at that.

Both of these are fundamentally correct, but you can see what altering the fundamentals does. And having an understanding and a knowledge of how fundamentals interact with one another can lead you down different paths for style. But keep in mind, this is practice.

Our objective isn't to have an Instagram-ready piece that we're gonna go ahead and post, or a perfect hand style that we're gonna use from here on out, or a perfect throwy that we're gonna use from here on out. We're doing this to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals. That way we can apply it to the hand style that we actually wanna use, and the throwy we wanna use, and the pieces we wanna do on walls and in the books. All right, so now for some basic practices for amateurs, intermediate graffiti artists, and advanced graffiti artists.

Starting with amateur graffiti artists, you're really going to wanna prioritize was impressed. practice having a consistent width for each basic box that makes up a letter. And as a result, a consistent width throughout your entire piece or throwing. You're also going to want to practice having... consistent fundamentally correct angles for each of your basic boxes as well.

This way you'll gain a better understanding of the actual letter structure and how that letter structure functions and how its negative space and its letter name weight are created as a result of that letter structure. If you're an intermediate graffiti artist I recommend practicing doing your letters at different sizes if you're doing a hand style. If you're doing a throwy or a piece try tapering your boxes Like we did here with our M.

And for your hand, solstice, throwies, and piece, change the angle that different basic boxes connect at. Similarly to what we did on the R. See and analyze how that affects different fundamentals. Now as you're changing the angle different things connect in for your hand, solstice, throwies, and pieces, try and keep it fundamentally correct.

Don't try and push the letter to the point where it breaks until you can connect things at unorthodox angles properly, consistently. Once you can... then attempt to break the letter to see where that limitation lies.

For advanced graffiti artists on your hand styles, do letters at different sizes. Maybe one letter, instead of going from the baseline to the cap line, it goes from the baseline to the ascender, which is a little space right above the cap line. Or maybe a second or third letter goes from the cap line all the way down to the descender, which is the area right below the baseline. Try playing around with that. That's applicable to your hand styles, throwies, as well as your pieces.

But also for your throwies and pieces specifically, try doing different sections of your letter at different widths. Maybe your stem is really skinny and your bowl is real fat, with another really skinny leg. Mix things up in this way and analyze its fundamental effects. The goal here should be to have consistency throughout the entire name, and for it to be fundamentally correct.

And then, do all that again, but with varying structures that you typically don't use. Now, because this is meant to be a practice, you will fail if you're doing the practice properly. And the reason for this is because, well, you're still learning, you're still progressing, right?

So, when you do fail, you want to be able to analyze what went wrong, the same way when we had the shallower leg of the R with the wider bowl, we were able to see, alright, we have a lot more negative space on this side with nothing to carry the positive space above it. That's the fundamental reason as to why that failed. So you want to be able to dissect stuff like that and pick up on those.

If you find that you can't come to those kind of conclusions, then you need to do more studying. Keep in mind... We're not looking for a photo finish here.

We're looking just to analyze the fundamental effects. So if it's ugly, that's perfectly fine Lastly for your hand styles, stories and pieces connect your basic boxes in very unorthodox ways in order to try and see where the letter Breaks that's the objective here. We're trying to break the letter, but don't rush to break the letter try and slowly Change things until it breaks that way you can find out where that limitation is now.

I move to letter name positioning This is a really Really fun fundamental because you can change quite a bit about a letter even though you're not changing the letter itself You'll notice that we have a standard are here Nothing is different about this are then our very first are we did initially the only thing we did was we kicked that guy on Over to his side and now he's leaning a bit to the left So what fundamentals does this affect and how well we can immediately see now we have a lot more negative space in this area over Here and we definitely changed negative space in this area over here That's something that would have to worry about in a hand style throw your piece But notice that the yard still keeping its balance somewhat and that's because of all the weight from the bowl on this side. That's got a lot of weight there so it's able to lean over to the left quite a bit before it really falls over to its side. On top of that we also have the leg of the yard that's loaning some of its weight as well in order to help keep it balanced.

Now the questions become for amateurs can I do this consistently and keep it fundamentally correct? For most amateurs the answer is gonna be no because you're still learning how to make your initial structures and how to position them properly to manage your weight in negative space. So this might end up causing a lot of issues for amateurs. For intermediate and advanced graffiti artists, the answer is going to be yes.

You should be able to do something like this. But the question you then want to ask yourself is, alright, well how much of this leg can we chop off before we begin to really knock this thing off balance? And how much more of the leg can we add in order to help add more weight so it doesn't even begin to look off balance to begin with?

Then from there, how do the changes to the letter structure, making it longer or shorter, how does that affect the negative space as well? And the letter positioning of... neighboring letters. Because obviously if I have this far of a leg outwards, well then it's going to be hard for another letter to nudge up close. Though an advanced graffiti artist might see an opportunity to raise a letter higher.

If I make the leg shorter, well that makes it easier for letters to nudge up close, which can help. to compensate for some of the weight and help to rebalance the R. Then you'd ask yourself, how does that affect the fundamentals? But let's not go too far down a rabbit hole, all right?

I think that's a pretty good example there. So from there, we move over to letter name positioning and letter name weight. We did the same piece here two times, basic straight letter, nothing fancy.

And you'll notice we raised the O roughly to the mean line. Of course, you're going to want to ask yourself, what fundamental effects does this have, right? I feel like that's going to be pretty consistent throughout this video. And over here, we went ahead and did the same exact letters, right? Nothing has changed with the letters.

They're pretty much identical. But this time we covered up up the O. Well that's a letter positioning issue that we'd want to go ahead and analyze. We'd want to go ahead and look at that and go, all right, what did that affect?

We positioned the letters too close together. Now how is that changing things as far as the other fundamentals are concerned? Well we can see if we draw the rest of the O, we immediately notice how much of this structure we're missing out on over here on the right hand side.

That structure that we need to see, that structure that develops the O's, well, structure. And because we lost out on all that portion for the O, we also diminished the O's weight. The O looks like it's hiding behind the other letters and that's not what we want.

We want that O to show through. So you're going to look at this and you're going to say, all right, well, how do we go ahead and fix that? We realize that this is a negative space management letter name positioning issue.

We position the letters too closely, which ate away at the O's letter structure, also diminished negative space, and that results in a diminished weight. for the letter O as well. So as a result of that, we can go ahead and fix this by nudging the N over to the right-hand side.

By changing its letter position, we get to show more of the O, and we have more negative space to help develop the O's structure here, on the bottom especially, and in the closed counter, because we were missing just a sliver over here. Now the question we have to ask ourselves is, how do we want these letters to overlap? If we look here, we can see that this line of the S goes on top... of the O, which means that we're not going to be able to see this portion of the structure.

We'll ask ourselves, how does that fundamentally affect the letter? Is that getting rid of too much structure? The answer is no. We can still clearly make out the letter if we get rid of this piece right here, and it doesn't really look like it's hiding. So now we draw the other portion of the O that we're missing, and we draw the N, and we contemplate, all right, if we have the N cover the O, well, we're eating away at a lot of structure once again, and it's bringing us really close to where we had the issue over here.

We're trying to avoid that, and as a result of that, we're going to want to go ahead and overlap the O on top of the N, because this maintains the end structure we're not really obscuring anything you can still very clearly make out the end and you can clearly make out the O as well. All is right in the world and now we understand those fundamentals and the relationship a little bit better. Now for intermediate graffiti artists I really recommend that you practice messing around with your mean line because the mean line dictates so much about our letters when you move that mean line higher or lower it's going to change your negative space and your weight distribution throughout a letter.

This is gonna cause a lot of problems expect to fail and that's completely alright that's kind of the objective for intermediate and advanced for 3D artists. Keep in mind, we're not trying to have a photo finish here so it's okay to be a little ugly. Make small adjustments to your mean line at first to keep the changes very minimal.

As you get better at doing that try and increase the changes to your mean line because this will drastically change your letters once again. As you get better go ahead and take that mean line and push it further and further. At some point you're going to break the letter and once again you just discovered more limitations that you can take into future sketches, hand styles, and throwys.

Keep in mind throughout this you're keeping your baseline and cap line exactly where they're meant to be. You're not changing those at all whatsoever. Now Now for advanced graffiti art. This one's gonna be a little difficult. Use multiple bass lines, mean lines, or cap lines for a singular hand style throw of your piece.

If you want to establish multiple of any of those three lines, you'll have to have multiple letters abide by each set of lines. So if you have two mean lines, let's say you have a four letter name. two of your letters will abide by one mean line, and two of your letters will abide by the other mean line.

When doing this, try to keep things as fundamentally correct as possible. It should be pretty difficult, especially if you don't already do this in your style. If you're really advanced and you find that too easy, in addition to that practice, angle and change your baseline, because your baseline has a massive impact on your name as a whole. While doing that, try to keep things fundamentally correct as well. Now we're changing things up, moving over to this throwy here, but can you guys spot the mistakes I included in this throwy?

Pause the video if you need to, because I'm about to point them out right here, But the very first one is going to be the overlap between the A and the W. That's gonna be something that we want to address here. From there we have this little nudge that happens at the bottom of the A. Next up we have this little bump on the A as well and then we have the drop shadow on the P as well as just the P in general.

When you're doing your graffiti of any kind, in this case we did a throwy, you really want to analyze the different qualities of your graffiti. In this case, I'm seeing the W and the A, and I'm seeing how close they got, I'm seeing how they overlapped, and how these lines specifically interact with one another. And I begin to look at it, and I say, you know, that is a lot of lines bunched up really closely together. If we look at the positive space in our throw, we don't...

have a lot of clutter. This right here is clutter. It's an eyesore. It's not good.

We want to get rid of that. So I think to myself, what letter do I want to overlap? Which one? And in this case, I would choose the W personally.

So I would go ahead and make this a solid bold line and get rid of at least this vertical part, if not the vertical and the horizontal section. From there, we move on over to the little bump at the bottom of the A, and that's simple line and shape issue, two of the elements of art. Remember, you do want to be studying your elements of art, no matter how advanced you are.

That's where the majority of your skill, knowledge, and progress is going to come from. So if I were to make a mistake like that, I would think about that and say, you know, I have to study and practice more of line and shape because lines make your shapes and shapes make your letter. So the cleaner your lines, the cleaner your shapes, and the cleaner your letter is going to be. From here we have this little bump on the A and while it fits the A, it's fundamentally correct on the A, it doesn't happen anywhere else on this throwy.

If you have any elements on your graffiti, whether it's a hand style throwy or a piece, look to see if you can include that somewhere else. You want things like this to happen at least two times, if not more. More is, you know, definitely going to help out. It's going to definitely be better.

And in some cases, you might actually need it to be more. Now, I don't really like the idea of putting this bump anywhere else on any of these other letters. So I would actually go ahead and remove this. Next up, the drop shadow on the P. Looking at this, it's going in the complete opposite direction of all of our other drop shadow.

As a result, I'd want to go ahead and study value and form because these two together are going to teach me about lighting and how shadows function. which in turn will teach me about drop shadows. Lastly, the P as a whole.

While the P is perfectly fine, it works better for a different throwy entirely, and sometimes this is true of our hand styles and pieces as well. We do a really nice letter that we're proud of, and it doesn't really fit the overall graffiti, so we're better off keeping that design for something else, and instead replacing it with something that works a little more for the overall cohesion. So, seeing this, I would think to myself, alright, let's do a couple more P's here, and personally what I- What I'd like to do is I would start by drawing the general shape of the neighboring letter. Now, the P is the last letter here, so I don't have to do one to the right, but... Instead we have the S here to the left.

So I would just draw the general shape of the S We don't need any details. We don't need to do anything crazy That way we can get a basic idea of how it would fit to the neighboring letter I think I'd like a little part of the P right here and then to shoot up for a bit of a spike and then come Downward to finish off in a more typical manner. Once I do that, I go ahead and say, you know I'm not a fan of that negative space that gets created between the S and the P.

That's gotta go It doesn't happen anywhere else really. Not to mention the fact none of our letters really have that pointy top Once again something that doesn't flow too well Maybe we can come up with something that looks a little bit more like what we we have. So you'd look at your hand style, throw in peace, you'd see the qualities that you have around your graffiti, and then you'd implement those qualities into the thing you're trying to adjust.

So we have this serif happening on the S. We have a similar thing going on on the A. Let's do something similar, but not exactly the same, on the P. We come up with that little square.

It also fills that negative space, which is really good. We then come back up, and we notice a much more rounded square shape at the tops of our letters. So let's go ahead and replicate that for the top left of the P over here, and then get real round over here on the right hand side for the bowl, to reflect that S and the bottom of the W and other sections of the letters as well, like the A. From there...

We'd look at our W and we'd say, all right, we have this kick that comes out to the right and we have the same thing on the A now that we got rid of that little bump. Let's go ahead and incorporate that on the P as well. And we're all well and good. From there, we can make smaller adjustments and say, yeah, all right, these things happened at the mean line.

So let me go ahead and establish this on the mean line. Keep in mind, we're not actually performing the throwy here. We're just analyzing and learning from our mistake.

Now we can go ahead and take these changes and actually implement them into the throwy as a whole. Overlaps. Your letters encompass space. And we can visualize this space by drawing a little square around the letter.

letter as a whole. You'll see these green areas mark the negative space that our letter leaves behind. It also shows us the general width that the letter inhabits. We want to keep this width consistent. We talked about this at the very beginning of the tutorial, but we also want to overlap.

So if we simply just took this width and we drew another box that was roughly the same width, we'd come out all the way over here. However, we really wouldn't have any overlap. So how do we overlap?

and keep that width consistent. Well, all we have to do is just draw these two widths slightly overlapping while keeping them consistent. And we'd see that, all right, our letter would extend about that far. Now, if we went ahead and did the A, we'd end up with a little something like that.

And now our letters go well together. They fit pretty nicely. Now, you can change a lot about your hand styles, throwies, and pieces with a simple switch, that being changing the shape. You can see here we have pretty rounded shapes, like our W is pretty rounded here on the bottom. Well, what happens if we were to go ahead and say for example, come to a slightly pointier bottom.

And now we have a little bit more of a triangular look to our W. If we did the A in much the same fashion and every subsequent letter, by the end of it, our throwing would look very different. It's a nice easy way to go ahead and make subtle changes to your letters.

And once again, this works for all forms of graffiti. Now these different shapes encompass different amounts of positive space and they leave behind different amounts of negative space. So, if you're intermediate or advanced, you'd want to look at that leftover space that we have, and you'd want to analyze the fundamental effects of that, because that could change your letter positioning as well, and it's almost certainly going to change your letter name weight. Now, that's going to be generally how you want to practice. It's essentially a process of studying and learning new things, predominantly about the elements of art, that's where the majority of your skill, knowledge, and progress is going to come from, even in graffiti, and then practicing that stuff that you just studied.

For beginners, no matter the art form you're working in, you want to achieve... the actual fundamental first. You're not trying to push anything, you're not trying to exaggerate anything, you're just trying to achieve a fundamentally correct whatever it is you're studying.

Whether it's letters, line shape form, value space, color texture, anatomy, expressions, whatever the case is. For intermediate artists, your goal is to not only achieve the fundamental consistently, but to also push it to see how far you can, but also to push it to see where that breaking point is. And for advanced artists, your goal is to once again learn more information, study that information, and achieve that consistently, but also to get a better understanding of different fundamental relationships and to gain an understanding of the limitations for each of those fundamentals and their relationships and this is the process of how you do that this process works for every art form now if you really want to study graffitis fundamentals we have the only book on the market that teaches you each one of the frees basics in the description down below and we also have the best how to do graffiti playlists right over here with more content YouTube thinks you'll enjoy right down here as always I want to thank guys for watching I'll catch you guys back here next week

Transcript for:Graffiti Art Progression Guide

Transcript for:
Graffiti Art Progression Guide