You can get acquainted with this type of modern visual art in almost any city. The painted walls of houses, fences, sheds will help you with this. And if you immediately categorically do not reject such a way of self-expression of young people, and carefully look at the drawings, you can make 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 mainly on the rocks. And the word "graffiti" in Italian means "scratch".
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 and the number of the quarter in which he lived: “Taki 183”. By the way, writers are artists who paint in the style of graffiti. After Taki 183, teenagers appeared in the poor neighborhoods of New York, who began to paint on city walls, in porches, garbage bins. They came up with nicknames and wrote them in strange letters.
Graffiti appeared in Russia in the 90s. By the way, along with break dance. After all, all this is part of hip-hop. Writers not only painted on walls and fences, they held hip-hop festivals, where they showed their art.
What is graffiti?
This is one of the areas of street art. The latter, by the way, is called street art and has an extensive list of various types.
In different countries of the world street art is treated differently. In France, for example, this type of art is legalized. On the
Scandinavian Peninsula, directly from train cars, you can see many drawings made in various styles of street art. In Russia, drawing graffiti in public places is a criminal offense for which a fine or even imprisonment is provided.
But this is in public places, and yet there are wastelands, abandoned construction sites, dead end deaf streets. In addition, sometimes the construction companies themselves invite to paint the fencing around the buildings, and residents of high-rise buildings give graffiti artists freedom of action in courtyards and porches. There are also days of graffiti festivals and other festivals, various exhibitions of writers who give the opportunity to show the art of graffiti in all its glory in public places.
So what is graffiti? To be precise, these are just graffiti using a three-dimensional image of the letters of the alphabet. But graffiti is constantly evolving. Old ones are improved and new original letter styles are invented, spray cans are modernized. To the inscriptions added full-fledged drawings. Now, some artists with the help of spray cans create real works of art.
Graffiti: how to learn to draw
Artists with experience advise to start by writing their nickname, then it is worth experimenting with the "third" dimension, to make the signature voluminous. You can safely add arrows, bubbles, mix paints from different spray cans. The incomprehensibility and complexity of the drawing will attract more attention to it, and it will help you to feel what graffiti is.
Nevertheless, the best advice for those who are starting to practice graffiti is to use a pencil first, not a spray can. Draw at home 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, find out why you need markers, airbrushes and caps, what paint is better to buy and why you should not paint 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 does not spoil really good buildings. He can create only where it is really required to revive the gloomy and fresh landscape of the industrial zone or abandoned wastelands, backyards.
The second - the writer never paints the drawings of other writers, otherwise it will bring shame and hostility to his colleagues on him.