What is up youtube, my name is SCIZ. I'm a Canadian graffiti artist here today to
show you and explain to you some of the graffiti techniques I use to do a freestyle graffiti piece,
just like the one i'll be showing you today. Now there are plenty of videos here on youtube where
great graffiti artists show themselves painting a graffiti piece, but what there aren't any of,
that I could, find were videos like this where an artist also explains their personal graffiti
and can control techniques. And that is what i'm here to do today. I'm going to show you and
explain my thoughts behind every step of this simple freestyle graffiti piece.
So let's get started. Most graffiti writers would say that the first step of a graffiti piece is
putting down the first lines or the initial design of your letters, but i would actually say that the
first step is marking out where all your letters are going to go. I know it's hard to see on the
wall but you saw me do this at the beginning with three vertical lines to separate the four letters
and mark out how big each of them will be. Since the blue is hard to see i won't waste your time
by showing you the first lines but that's basically just marking of the initial design
of your letters. The next step is of course the fill-in which is filling in your letters. Because
this is a freestyle graffiti piece, i kept the fill-in pretty simple with just two colours,
black and a darker gray. For anyone who doesn't know what a freestyle
graffiti piece is, that's one where you're not using a design on paper as a reference. Of
course for the fill-in i'm using the standard back and forth technique for the most part.
That brings me to another point about technique; I would never try and say that
my graffiti techniques are the only correct ones because every graffiti artist develops their own
personal technique to a certain degree, but i have been studying graffiti and creating
graffiti for over a decade now so some of my graffiti techniques are unique to me and
are personally developed and others are classic techniques that are good for all writers to know
and because of that i'm sure there's something in here that would be new to every writer.
Now i'm going to give you an up close and personal view of the outline.
Because i am doing the 3d later in the same colour, i can do the outline now, before the 3d.
For this i use a skinny cap for most of the inner lines and a fat cap for most of the outer lines,
to help emphasize the most important parts of the letters and to promote directional flow.
I'll give everyone a bit of a longer look here at how i try to do continuous lines
and not too many choppy ones so that the piece stays clean even before the cutbacks.
You can skip to the video place marker for the next step but i would highly recommend
that the newer graffiti enthusiasts take a look at the technique i'm using here.
You can see here i've started to use a fat cap to outline the outer lines of the letters.
Notice how with these lines at the bottom my whole body is moving with the spray can;
it's really important to keep your body moving with the spray can,
keep it rigid - this is a technique that people use to get nice clean lines.
The next step you're seeing here is just me marking out the directional lines of the
3d. All of these lines should point to a specific perspective point you have chosen like the one on
screen. You can see that i'm careful to make my perspective lines, in this case,
all angled towards the bottom middle of the piece and make all of these lines the
same length. This uniformity in length is what will make all the 3d look the same thickness.
This is the point in the piece where things get sort of technical and it
becomes super important to develop good can control through practice
to be able to do cutbacks with the fill-in colours to create clean, sharp lines, corners, and edges.
After these cutbacks, i am adding the highlights on the rightward
edges of each letter and also cutting them back with black if necessary with the same technique.
The only things left to do for this graffiti piece here is do the pink background,
which you're seeing right now. That really helps the piece pop out of the wall. Sometimes people
do the background before the outline to make the piece even cleaner which i didn't do here.
I also added some blue, just to contrast a little bit with the other colours in the
piece so here is a look for you at the final product of this freestyle graffiti piece.
Give this video a like to let me know if you did find it helpful.
You can take a look at another video on my can control techniques that i used
more specifically on screen and of course these tutorial type videos are all available
on my Patreon which is the first link in the description. I'll see you in my next video, peace!