@Ideas_Factory The blog of Julian S. Wood

Kids love Graffiti, nowadays known as ‘Urban Art’-I am pretty useful at lettering and often my students ask me to teach them how to do it.

These are some links that I use with them and some extras. This was also the 2 minute presentation I did for Teachmeet Nottingham.

Graffiti has always been fashionable but has never been mainstream, there is something subversive and anarchistic about graffiti and some of the websites I will show you represent this side of urban art extremely well.

Draw Here is one such site, the internet is Draw here‘s walls and it enables anyone to graffiti over any website. That’s it-simple. Practise your tagging anywhere on the internet and deface any website!Don’t worry it’s not a permanent feature, only when you log into Draw here and click on the link does the graffiti appear. But as you can imagine you can have enormous fun.

Here’s the club penquin website as it appears normally.

……..and this is what it looks like with a Draw Here Graffiti makeover!

Next up is Zee Wall This takes tagging to a new level on the internet-take you ‘virtual’ spray can and tag some real online walls. Even has some famous walls to graffiti on. Has loads of fabulous ‘paint’ options, colours, thickness of spray etc.

Graffiti Playdoh is very similar to Zewall but you only have one wall to ‘Throw’ a piece on. But it does have a brilliant animated spray can and is the most realistic of all the websites I have showcased. As you can see in this short video it really is very simple! A great starting point for novices.

The Graffiti Creator is a free, online flash application which allow you to design your own name or logotype in graffiti-style.The Graffiti Creator comes with several fonts from throwups to bubble letters to wildstyles. The program also have an array of different tools that will help you further enhance your design. It’s fabulously simple, I get kids to do their own name and then print out a simple outline. They then trace over their design onto paper and add the visual elements,like colour etc.

Here’s my quick effort at my own name, adding shadow, bubbles, sunrise effect and outline. Pretty impressive and definitely has wow factor with kids.

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Banksy? Then Atom Smashers Graffiti maker is for you. It auto-generates the text and you can include a photo character to give your creation a bit of political bite.

Here’s my simple effort for Teachmeet Nottingham.

NYC Graffiti Creator-A very simple Graffiti widget-choose background, style, size and colour. Then grab an embed code for your blog!

Hopefully this is enough to get a School graffiti club going. I feel it’s really important that educators really try and engage students by teaching them stuff about what they are interested in. Graffiti is a no-brainer-all kids love Street Art and if there is ever a way to grab the attention of those reluctant boys this is it!

There are tons of graffiti font generators out there too. These are very simple websites that will generate graffiti text just by typing into a text box.

All the links and more are here

Further Reading

How to draw Graffiti on the indestructibles website

Learn Graffiti has a great Glossary Page 

Best of the lot is the Trainwriters website