So You Wanna be the Next Great Street/graffiti Artist: Things You Should Know Before You Begin. Part One

Okay, where to begin, where to begin? Ah, yes. Getting your name out there. First you will need a name to represent on the streets this really all depends on what type of street art you plan on doing. If it's graffiti you might want to start out by mashing up 4,5, or 6 letters that you think looks cool. You wont want something long because it take to long to tag, the less time to do a throw up the more you can get done. If it's stickers and such you really are limitless on what name you can have. Either way deciding your first name shouldn't be a major decision because, believe me you will change/shorten/elongate names several times as you progress. Now that you have a name lets move onto getting it up.

There are many ways you can go about this as I stated earlier:

The first would to be grab one of these and go at it:

As you get better you can get different cans and different caps which can be found on most art sites.

The Second would be to make stickers (my favorite). First off let me say that getting United States Postal Service labels, DHL labels, and UPS labels are Free it is also ILLEGAL to use them in any other manner then their intended purpose.

Photo Credit: USPS.com

This is what a USPS Priority Mail Label looks like.

Photo credit: Miasma

Here are two decorated (ILLEGAL) USPS labels.

So the legal route is to buy a adhesive paper or name badges and using those. You can now use these stickers and doodle anything on them. The preferred pens of choice for doodling on stickers are, DecoColors, Sharpies, and Elmer's Painters. If you chose to put them up in public (ILLEGAL), please remember people are going to look at them. Do NOT just get a picture from the internet and turn it black and white and then put your name underneath it and print 1 million out like this:

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodies_tc/

To me this is not a sticker. This is very "blah" and is what give graffiti such a bad rap. Take some time and put some more effort into it!

Thirdly you can make a stencil. This is a very simple process but can also get very complex as you get better. To begin find any image you like.

Now turn the image to black and white (easier if you have Adobe Photoshop and mess with the brightness and contrast levels).

Now that you have this image print it out on any printer and glue it (preferably spray adhesive) to cardboard or cardstock. Once it adheres to the cardstock/cardboard you are ready to grab a exacto knife or box cutter and cut out the white or black image. This will take some practice but you will get much better and be able to make several layers of colors instead of just a one color stencil.

The last but not least is Wheatpasting. Wheatpaste can be made with basic house materials and the recipe can be found anywhere online, it creates a makeshift papier-mâché. The ingredients are flour and water that you heat until it thickens and it makes a glue. You will have to play around with this recipe to get it to your liking. The glue is only one part of wheatpasting the second is to find some large paper preferably newsprint it is thin and accepts the glue really good. Draw a design on the newsprint and cut it out and its now ready to be pasted. It is best to use a large brush to apply the glue onto the surface and the poster. When applying the glue to the poster remember to use an outward motion pushing hard to get all the air bubbles out. Here is a finished (ILLEGAL) product.

Thanks for viewing hope you learned something! Let me know what you think or what you think I missed or messed up on!