Graffiti Handstyle Tutorial
Handstyles are the foundation of all graffiti and for this reason, tags are the most important form of graffiti to learn. How you learn, and practice tags will determine how much you progress, how you understand, and how good you become in all other forms of graffiti. We teach you all of the fundamentals in our new book “The Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book” . To begin, lets understand that graffiti is a letter-based art form, meaning we have actually to write letters when we practice. Adding tons of style can get in the way of this, and adding style almost always destroys the letter when new artists attempt it. Save stylistic flairs for your free time when you’re drawing for fun, and instead, refrain from adding style to your practice.
Here is our lettering chart, which will help us keep our letters nice and proportioned to one another. Since graffiti treats all letters like uppercase letters, you’re going to make sure each letter reaches from the cap line, down to the base line, with their centers roughly at the mean line.
As for spacing, you don’t want any overlaps that are too large as this ends up hiding key structural points in letters which results in the destruction of the overlapped letter. You also don’t want too large of a gap between letters since this will diminish flow. Try a modest overlap instead. Overlapping in this way will increase flow between letters, and it will ensure all structures are still intact.
Its important for new artists to practice getting clean shapes and lines, so every day take a few min out of your day to draw some basic shapes and sketch some lines. Forget about letters when doing this, just focus on refining your lines and shapes. These two topics are crucial for graffiti since if you have sloppy lines or shapes then you’re going to have sloppy letters. While lines and shapes might seem easy, no amateur artist has refined these to an adequate, let alone a professional level. If you keep it simple and practice these basics then you should be well on your way to progress. If you’d like to learn all there is to know about all of graffiti’s fundamentals then check out our book “The Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book”. Here we teach you each of graffiti’s basics and we even explore how to get your own style in graffiti.
