Graffiti Tutorial - Letter Name Weight
Letter name weight is a vital aspect of graffiti as this fundamental is responsible for keeping your letters, and name, looking balanced. Bad letter name weight can take otherwise good graffiti and make it look magnitudes worse so our goal is to balance the name, as this will also ensure flow, another one of graffiti’s fundamentals. I want to take some time to give you guys 3 tips you can try in your graffiti to improve letter name weight but if you want to learn all about graffiti then check out our new book that makes graffiti easy to learn.
Tip 1: Consistancy
Regardless if you’re doing a tag, throwie or piece, consistency is key! Often times new artists struggle to keep a consistent aesthetic in their work as they’re too focused on cramming as much style as they can into their graffiti. If you’re keeping things simple then consistency is just about automatic, but if you’re adding style, try this. Design one letter, and pick 1 or two features to carry into the next letter. Continue this process for each one, making sure all, or most of your letters have this repeating element. How will this help your weight? We’ll it will ensure that your letters don’t contrast way too much. Having large amounts of contrast decreases flow, and while this can be used to great effect, if you’re newer, that contrast will almost always hurt more than anything.
Tip 2: Counterbalance
One of the biggest mistakes new artists struggle with is not counterbalancing. They’ll add a huge detail to one side of their name without adding a comparable detail on the opposite side. This makes the side with the detail much heavier and as a result, makes the opposing side look weaker. Not only that, now that there is such a stark difference, the left and right sides of the name no longer look cohesive.
In this Fler tag, you’ll see, they’ve made a massive F on the left of their name. They follow that up with “L, E, R, O, N”, all the same size. Then at the very end, they’ve added a massive E to help balance the left side. Now what’s interesting is the E’s structure isn’t whats large or heavy, rather the weight comes from contrast. Contrast not only in the negative space the E allows for, but contrast in the rounded nature and style when compared to the other smaller letters. Add in the repeating detail on the E and suddenly you have a nice balance to the name.
Tip 3: Focal Point
When you become really comfortable with the basics, you can begin to explore with concepts and ideas. For example, we’ve talked about how to balance visual weight, but what if you don’t necessarily want balance? Well, that’s when you’d plan around the imbalance by having the name revolve around the concept. To be clear, there’s an infinite amount of ways to go about this, but Boogie shows one method. Here the letters themselves are balanced by staying on the same baseline and being roughly similar sizes. However, the G takes on a striking color that contrasts all the other letters. Its saturation and value also contrast as well and this creates a focal point. All art, including graffiti, needs a focal point, normally the whole name works as the focus in the average graffiti. In this case, Boogie makes the G the focus, and he’s careful to ensure no other letters take the limelight from the G. When you plan around a detail like this, you can really make some effective focal points that will drag people’s attention, but you have to be careful. With this level of contrast, you’re bound to make the focus stand out, and as a result, the focal point might not flow. Its for this reason we have to make sure to use plenty of graffiti’s other fundamentals such as flow with letter and line uniformity and similarity to help compensate for lost flow. Try out these 3 tips in some of your upcoming graffiti and play around with different ways to contrast. If you need any help, be sure to check back in with the video and also check out our new book where we teach all of graffiti’s basics.
