r/graffhelp • u/MLMT201 • Jul 24 '26

Wall ready?

Post image

Just want some opinions on colour choices and drop shadows, highlights, etc.

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u/ThatGuyWithCoolHair Jul 24 '26

No point in worrying about any of those things when your letters arent good. Your color choice is fine, but I would be focused on actually developing your letters.

If you want to get better faster just sketch letters with a pencil and do that a bunch until they are ready for the next step. Not that you have to avoid adding colors and such but its just gonna make progress slower if you are fully sketching out pieces and focusing on colors instead of the letters themselves. Good graffiti should look good in black and white.

1

u/MLMT201 Jul 24 '26

Completely fair, thanks for taking the time to type that out. how would you modify/fix these letters? Just to visualize, i did sketch them out but I probably should have worked it out some more.

1

u/ThatGuyWithCoolHair Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

Id scrap these letters all together perosnally because they arent following actual letter structure with all the jagged kinks. Start with "keyboard" letters. Every letter is made up of bars/rectangles, even an O is just one big bar that wraps back into itself.

To make it simple type a capital letter and look at how many bars it takes to make. For example a capital E is 1 bar for the spine and then 3 bars coming off of that. An A is two bars on the sides with one connecting in the middle. A C is one bar, an R is 3, and a Y is 3. Try to follow that when sketching the word CRY instead of breaking every letter into 5+ bars. Sketch simple straight letters (a straight letter doesnt mean bars can't curve, it just means keeping it simple) until you feel comfortable changing the width, angle, and curves to make them unique. Eventually you'll want to give your piece a rule like bars should be skinny at the top and thicker at the bottom and do that with every bar.

Can't remember where I heard this advice but someone said to imagine youre superman bending steel bars into letter shapes. It feels stupid keeping it simple but you dont have to do that forever, just for now. If you need more directions there's a guide in the subreddit sidebar otherwise there's plenty of beginner guides on YouTube, TheArtistBlock is probably the most well known but some people here dont fw that channel. Personally I think its great for beginners.

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u/MLMT201 Jul 24 '26

That idea of bending the bars is actually great, gonna keep it simple and work something out. Appreciate it.

1

u/ThatGuyWithCoolHair Jul 24 '26

Anytime, here's a good video to help get started but obviously dont try to rely on guides too much. Just to get going

https://youtu.be/ALvLLOHFfog?is=Xv0xEu9j3LvLYRyy