How to Get Started Making Legal Graffiti

Bring your paint, equipment, and a digital camera in a plastic bag and go to a legal wall. Legal walls exist all around the world, and you can often find them by asking employees at the shop where you buy your spray paint or checking online.^[2]

Start painting the wall with the wall paint or spray cans and paint roller.^[3] If you use an extension shaft for the paint roller, it will make this process much faster and easier. You do not want to wait hours before it dries, so do not use too much paint on the paint roller. Paint a layer large enough to cover the graffiti that is already on the wall completely. Make sure you paint long enough on both sides so that none of the letters become too big and go outside of the field you have painted.

Start spraying with a light color in the way you want the letters to look. This is called "sketching" the letters. If you want to make a cartoon face or portrait somewhere around the "piece", start with that now and follow the same procedure as with the letters. It is important to use a light color because if you want to make adjustments later, a light color can be covered by darker colors. However, the reverse is not necessarily true, so you will see lines from the darker colors come through. You should only make empty letters first without any "fill in" (painting inside the letters). You should also make the shadow or 3D effect on the letters with the same color. Imagine that light is shining on the letters from a certain direction and make the shadow on the opposite side. It is vitally important that you give the shadow the same thickness on all of the letters.

Fill in the letters with the colors you want. Try making patterns and symbols in different colors inside the letters. For the main colors you can use a fat cap, which makes it come a lot of paint from the can, but for the patterns, and especially if you want to make a fading effect, it is better with a skinny cap.^[4] This can be anything. It is important that you get finished with the "fill in", before starting with the outline, because you will quickly end up spraying over the outline with the "fill in" colors, because e.g. the wind blows the paint around.

Make the background. Here you also make e.g. patterns and symbols. A smart thing is to choose colors that are colder than the ones you used inside your "piece". Because this will make the background look like it is further away than the letters, which will stick out.

Paint the outline on the letters and shadow (or 3D effect). Use a color that stands out a lot from the colors you have used in the background and inside the letters.^[5] Often a dark color is the best, like black, but not always. This is important to make it easy to see the difference between background and "fill in". This is one of the most important steps, because black is hard to cover up, so if you make mistakes when spraying the outline, it will quickly make the "piece" look bad. Take small lines at a time, not whole letters. But from point to point where the letter's shape changes direction. If there are complicated lines, take a "practice swing" to simulate the movement you have to do with the can before starting to spray the line.

Paint the "skyline". This is a line that goes outside the letters and the shadow, that separates the background from the letters. This makes the "piece" much better at once. If you spray over the outline while making the "skyline", just use the color you used for the outline to fix it. But remember to save enough of the outline color until you are finished, to fix the most important things.

Add effects to the "piece" if desired. This is what separates the really great "pieces" from the not so great. Now you can add something called "shining". Which is a line that is white or yellow that you put where the light would shine on the letters. And that is supposed to be on the exact opposite side of the shadow. So where you have shadow, you are not supposed to have "shining" and vice versa. If you make a 3D effect instead, then a "shining" is wrong to make, because if there is no shadow, there is no "shining". It is just like when you draw a person, one place there is shadow and another place there is light.

• You can also make something called an "inline", this is almost the same as an outline, but it is complicated to make and will definitely ruin your "piece" if you do not do it properly. Something the "shining" will also do because these effects are advanced. The "inline" is a line that goes on the inside of your outline in all the letters. This can be very cool, but it is not in all "pieces" this effect is suitable.

Complete any additional (and optional) elements. It is very common to write the year that you made the "piece", and it is also very nice to know when looking in old photo albums. To write the place you made it is also a possibility. Because if you start making a lot of graffiti you are not going to remember when and where you made every "piece". Then you write your signature beside the "piece". The best thing to do is to take a skinny cap and write it on the right side of the "piece" low down under it. Because a huge signature draws a lot of attention, and you do not want the signature to grab the viewer's attention from the big letters.

• After this you can also dedicate your "piece" to someone, and write 4: which means for e.g. "My buddies". You can also write a greeting to someone with Yo. E.g. Yo: Eric and King D. You have to know the people you are greeting; you can not greet to or dedicate your "piece" to, for example, a big graffiti artist you do not know because that is like "saying" that you know him or that he or she said it was okay for you to do it. If you have something smart to say that is short or know a good line from e.g. a rap song you can also write it.