Old School Graffiti Letters

[Alfie Overacre]

Moderngraffiti is a cultural art form with a variety of styles and purposes. In general, graffiti art is made in public spaces like subway cars and on the walls and surfaces of buildings as murals. In this lesson, students will study the writing styles of many different graffiti artists. To relate this school based artwork back to a physical place, students choose a place they find particularly significant, like their home city or a place they would like to visit. They will write out the name of this place in graffiti-style typography and add a simple background icon to represent that place.

CONTENT Standard #1: Understanding and applying media, techniques and processes.

CONTENT Standard #3: Choosing and evaluating a range of subject matter, symbols and ideas.

CONTENT Standard #4: Understanding the visual arts in relation to history and cultures.

Instructions 1Have students think of a place that is important to them. Tell them to write down this place's name or title on a piece of paper.

Show and discuss graffiti art, focusing on the lettering style, layout, and composition. Notice how some lettering overlaps and intertwines while other lettering is evenly spaced. Notice how some lettering is creatively colored, shaded, and outlined.

If available, use a computer lab and a word processing program to type out the name of their place in a variety of fonts and styles. Printing these can be helpful for reference. A wider variety of fonts can be referenced.

Students should practice writing their place in at least three different styles before deciding on their final font style. They should also choose a simple image for the background that references their place.

Lightly sketch out the lettering using Crayola Twistables Erasable Colored Pencils. Outline the pencil letters in a dark Crayola Marker color like purple or blue to make them bold. This gives you a hollow, puffy letter.

When finished with the lettering, sketch a background using Erasable Colored Pencils. Most lines can be traced boldly with a marker, while some important details can be colored with eXtreme or Neon crayons.

Using clean water and a large flat brush, pull the color from the marker lines into the negative space in the background. This wash gives your marker drawing colored tones while also smoothing out any jagged lines. Watch as the eXtreme or Neon crayon resists the wash and makes the crayon lettering pop out from the background.

Draw the X and Y axis on your surface to break the space into four boxes. In each box, you will ask students to do different designs. You will also do a demonstration drawing for each design. Students can use their initials to start, or any two letters of their choosing.

By giving them different challenges, students are breaking habits in their mind and creating new ways to design. After filling up each box, have students wipe their boards clean, and draw four new boxes.

Continue this idea in the remaining boxes. Twist letters. Stack letters. Make letters connect to each side of the box. Really force students have to leave their comfort zones. Once they have had some practice, have students overlap letters. Ask students to add new letters and try to overlap three and four letters in one box. When students are finished quickly with any one box challenge, invite them to create designs, images, and patterns inside their letters. All of these actions will help develop their letter designing ideas for graffiti-inspired work.

The last activity to do on the dry erase boards is to allow students to design a word using various strategies. Instead of four boxes, have students divide their surfaces into two halves by drawing one line. Give students five to ten minutes to design a word in each box. These words need to incorporate overlap, perspective, designs inside, or unusual letter design. Do not let students use tag letters simply because the artistic conventions applied to them are limited. Students can write tag letters within letters or words, but make sure students are focusing on the shape and form illusions that have been practiced.

Drawing is a common way to begin a Visual Arts class. Instead of drawing things we see, such as hands or fruit, why not have students practice drawing what they do not see but may be familiar with. By manipulating letters, students are practicing hand-eye coordination, developing confidence, and starting to find excitement in the act of drawing.

Letters have a certain low-risk association because they are used by students every day. By starting the year in graffiti-related study, students who have the most anxiety toward art can find success and purpose from the moment school begins. Graffiti-inspired study can be brief and simple, or it can be months of complex composition creation. Either way, starting off the school year by using graffiti to work on drawing and color theory is a dynamic way to enhance fundamental art skills and concepts.

Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.

Although many may consider it disgusting, there are still people out there who see graffiti as an art form. It requires skill and the right type of materials in order to write anything in graffiti style. Now doing it on other people's properties not so good, but on a piece of paper, that's much better. In this video tutoria, you'll see how to write a name in an old school graffiti style. So good luck, enjoy, and please don't break the law by tagging up things that don't belong to you!

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But the internet did not move on. For eight months people have been offering me theories over Twitter and Facebook. And what's interesting is that I keep hearing the same theories over and over. So here they are. My favourite five theories as curated by the internet.

The most frequent claim, by far, is that the symbol originated with an Arizona metal band named Sacred Reich. The band has been playing thrash metal since 1985, and once even toured Australia with Sepultura back in 1994. I'm an Australian who was in school in the 90s, so it's possible the band could've brought the S over with them on tour. But when I reached out to the band's bass guitarist, he assured me they didn't invent the S. "I'm pretty sure Suzuki was using it long before our little band," Phil Rind explained. "Our guitar player Jason used to ride motocross and I'll bet he rode a Suzuki. That's where we got it. Anyway, it's nice of those people to think we invented it. But they're wrong."

This theory was originally suggested by a woman who works at Stussy and appeared in the original article. At the time, I didn't chase it. So let's do that now. Lewis Croft is the Australian marketing manager for Suzuki. I wrote Lewis a long email to which he responded: "The drawing you have sent to me is not an earlier version of the Suzuki logo nor is it our current, official logo. This is the Suzuki logo as it first appeared in 1958."

So I decided to ask Richard Valdemar: a former detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. For the better part of 33 years, Richard was tasked with combating LA's Gangs, which is why Police Magazine now uses him as an expert on the matter. But according to Richard, the S has nothing to do with any gangs he's seen.

"While the letter appears in gang and tagger graffiti-style, I wouldn't say it's the most common style used by Southern California gangs," he explained. "Usually, Californian Latino gangs almost always use the S followed by the number 13, as in 'S-13.' This is because the 13th letter of the alphabet is M standing for Mexican Mafia. Either that or it's written 'SUR,' which is Spanish for South or for 'Southern United Raza.' The letter S, just standing alone wouldn't represent the Sureos."

That all seemed pretty conclusive, so I asked Richard about his own theory about where the S came from. According to him it was probably just some viral piece of graffiti text, currently attributable to no one. "It's like 'bubble text' and letters formed from arrows," he said. "These lettering styles are just used universally."

Nikki is a woman who got in touch via Facebook to explain that she personally invented the S. Although I'm pretty unconvinced she did, it should be said that Nikki is lovely, and definitely not the first person to believe they've invented something. Case in point: me. I once thought I'd pioneered that 2000s trend of wearing belt buckles sideways. Nikki might be mistaken about the S, but I was definitely mistaken about the belt thing. So who am I to judge?

"I started that S drawing in the late 70s and 80s," Nikki explained. "The S was for my tag name Stormer! You can't find its origins because it doesn't belong to any company. I came up with that S with my best friend. Sorry to upset you, but it's not Superman, Stussy, or Suzuki. Just my tag name symbol!"

You know how in old books they often turn the first letters into an illustration? Like if the passage is "once upon a time" the "O" will appear as a piece of medieval graphic design with a castle and a few fauns. These things are called "decorated initials. According to Sonja Drimmer, who is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, the S could be one of these.

"Recently I decided I should learn how to use a quill," explained Sonja. "So I've started making my own quills from turkey feathers and writing with quill ink. At the same time I read your article, and decided to try writing an S and discovered it's really hard to draw with a quill." Sonja described that the problem is that drawing an "S" requires pushing a quill in two different directions, which creates two opposing "C" shapes instead of a single flowing line. But this problem can be overcome if you produce the "S" with a lot of vertical strokes.

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