Do you know what graffiti is?

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

You can get acquainted with this type of contemporary visual art in almost any city. The painted walls of houses, fences, sheds will help you with this. And if you do not immediately categorically reject this way of self-expression of young people, but take a closer look at the drawings, you can be sure that everything looks very beautiful.

From Antiquity to Modernity

The history of graffiti begins in the distant past. After all, our ancestors also made drawings and inscriptions, only mostly on the rocks. And the word "graffiti" in Italian means "scribble".

Modern graffiti originated in the 70s of the 20th century among teenagers and was considered street art. The first graffiti drawings were made in the New York subway. The first writer appeared there, who put his signature under them and the number of the quarter in which he lived: “Taki 183”. By the way, writers are artists who paint in graffiti style. After Taki 183, teenagers appeared in the poor neighborhoods of New York, who began to draw on the city walls, inhallways, garbage cans. They invented nicknames for themselves and wrote them in an incomprehensible font.

Graffiti appeared in Russia in the 90s. By the way, along with breakdance. It's all part of hip-hop. The writers did not just draw on walls and fences, they held hip-hop festivals, where they showed their art.

What is graffiti?

This is one of the directions of street art. The latter, by the way, is called street art and has a voluminous list of different types.

In different countries of the world, street art is treated differently. In France, for example, this kind of art is legalized. On the Scandinavian Peninsula, right from the train cars, you can see a lot of drawings made in various styles of street art. In Russia, painting graffiti in public places is a criminal offense that carries a fine or even imprisonment.

But this is in public places, but there are wastelands, abandoned construction sites, dead-end back streets. In addition, sometimes construction companies themselves are invited to paint fences around construction sites, and residents of high-rise buildings give graffiti artists freedom of action in courtyards and porches. And then there are the days of graffiti fests and other festivals, various exhibitions of writers, which provide an opportunity to show the art of graffiti in all its glory in public places.

So what is graffiti? To be precise, these are just inscriptions on the walls using a three-dimensional image of the letters of the alphabet. But graffiti is constantly evolving. Improved old andnew original styles of letters are invented, spray cans are modernized. Full-fledged drawings have been added to the inscriptions. Now some artists are using spray paint to create real works of art.

Graffiti: how to learn to draw

Experienced artists are advised to start by writing their nickname, then it is worth experimenting with the "third" dimension, making the signature voluminous. You can safely add arrows, bubbles, mix paints from different cans. The incomprehensibility and confusion of the picture will draw more attention to it, and it will help you feel what graffiti is.

Still, the best advice for those who are starting to do graffiti is to first use not a spray can, but a pencil. Draw houses on sheets of paper, sketching some drawings or inventing your own characters.

When you are satisfied with the result of drawing on paper, consider creating a sketch of the drawing, which you will then transfer to the wall.

Over time, you will learn how to make graffiti stencils, accurately use the technique of shadow and bright colors, learn what markers, airbrushes and caps are for, what paint is better to buy and why you should not draw in windy weather. Only knowing all these subtleties, one can clearly understand what graffiti is.

Graffiti culture

It turns out that there is such a concept. It includes two main rules. First, a writer never ruins really good buildings. He can create only where it is really required.revive the gloomy and bland landscape of an industrial zone or abandoned wastelands, backyards.

Second - the writer never paints over the drawings of other writers, otherwise it will bring disgrace and hostility to his colleagues.