Hi, I'm Jay French, from Jay French Studios.com. Today I'm going to teach you how to draw graffiti
names. Now, of course, there's a infinite number of styles with graffiti, but we're
going to go with...we're going to with one here just to show you some basics. Most of
it is about names, so I'm going to use my nickname, Shatter. And, I'm going to do this
a little taller and thinner. Just draw some basic letters to start with. You can draw
it really lightly, go back and erase it later. Or if you go over it in ink, then you can
more easily erase the letters. And once you've got your general arrangement, then you can
get crazy with it. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to do every other letter big, every
other letter small. And you can get really wild. We're going to make this sort of look
serrated. It's always hard to draw a curve against your hand, so if you move the page
around, it'll work with your body better. And I'm just going to do about four letters
here. Feel free to get your proportions, your angles, all of 'em odd, because graffiti is
all about expression. So, then we'll have a big A. We're going to go with that serrated
thing again. And you can see this is, you know, of course, a real rough...you'll refine
it .... like I said, in ink, or just using your eraser. Okay. Now a lot of what... and
I'm going to go ahead and erase the inner lines because I'm going to put a little color
on here. A lot of what graffiti is about is about color. You don't ever see a whole lot
of black and white graffiti. So we're going to do a little bit of a two tone, a fade.
Now graffiti's usually done with spray paint, but you'll see it in all manner of mediums,
really. Most of it is made to mimic. If it's not in spray paint, it's made to mimic spray
paint. So, what we'll have here is a fade, which will look like a spray fade. I have
a dark yellow going on there. I actually need to fade that out more. Now this is not always
the case. You don't have to use fades, even in a lot of graffiti styles you will see set
lines, hard lines. One of the things you can do in colored pencil, is you can actually
go through with a white blending, or a blending pencil to get more smoothness. That one came
out a little rough, but it gives the impression of the spray paint feel, which is the very
modernistic look that is the signature to graffiti style. And especially with names,
when you're....you want to really be expressive as to what you're trying to get across because
this is your name, or a name that has an emotional attachment, so you want....you want a feel
behind it. And you can go through, and add details such as highlights. I would actually
go through with, perhaps some paint, or something more solid to give that more of a white. Or
I would've just left the white area. And I can go through here with, like, usually just
use...you can use black. In fact, feel free to use plenty of black, again, it's dramatic,
harsh, which you want for this type of look. We're going to put a shaded area there. I'm
using a dark red just to accent that, but then I would go through, and I would go in
with the black, I'm just going to use pencil for now, and add some dimensionality to it
as if the letters were actually thick. And add some depth. And this way you'll get a
really cool look to graffiti names.