Let's jump into some street art tutorials from Computer Arts and other sources that will have you creating very cool digital murals and graffiti in Photoshop. We'll take a look a handful of articles that showcase multiple inspirational graffiti artists work. We'll also look at some additional groups, resources, and graffiti style freebies. Let's look at graffiti artists in action and their digital production techniques.
Tutorials
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From Sketch to Wall
This tutorial covers a workflow for graffiti artists to follow that will result in professional results. Illustrator and Photoshop are utilized after sketching to create a polished well planned design. The tutorial reviews this process. You may only want to take the tutorial this far, and result in a stylish graffiti digital design. Though the tutorial takes this further and shows you how to spray this on a wall as well.
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From Spray Paint to Pixel
There are plenty of places to purchase sprays, drips, and splatter stock, but have you ever wanted to created them yourself. This tutorial shows you how. It also reviews how to create sprayed stencils and marker scripts as well. Once created, you can scan your creations into Photoshop.
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Virtual Murals
Just Maller uses his imagination and signature style to create a digital graffiti mural. The concept is that you could use this to plan an actual graffiti mural design, which is possible, but the tutorial is completely focused on creating a cool digital design in Photoshop.
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Photoshop Street Art
Use some Photoshop digital collage techniques, filters, and layer effects to create an East LA style digital mural. The result is rugged and looks like fun to make.
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Graffiti Stamp Art in Photoshop
Derek Lea shows us how to make Graffiti style monster characters into brushes. Then he applies them over a brick wall, paints them in Photoshop, and shows us how to finish the design. You may also want to look at his tutorial Realistic Mapping Effects as well, as it shows how to take graffiti design and apply it to a wall as well with a quick Displacement Map.
Other Tutorials
The tutorials listed above are all form Computer Arts and are available as free PDF downloads. There are certainly tutorials on graffiti and street art elsewhere on the web. Here are a handful you may want to review: Realistic Graffiti Effect Photoshop Tutorial, Creating and Implementing Graffiti, Create a Spectacular Graffiti Effect, Make Graffiti effect photoshop, and Graffiti Photography: Photoshop Technique. If you know of any high quality tutorials on this subject, let us know in the comments.
Articles
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30 Great Examples of Graffiti Writing and Graffiti Street Art
This is a predominately visual post that showcases some great graffiti and street art. There is an eclectic display of tags, murals, worn, bright, happy, and sinister designs. There is a full selection of artwork to check out.
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Graffiti Art to Boost Your Inspiration
Another large selection of graffiti and street art on display. Some great characters and 3D typography here. There is also the ability to click on each image and view the work at a large size.
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The Unique Street Art of Melbourne
The street art displayed in this post is unique to the CBD area of Melbourne Australia. There is a large collection of photographs of street art shown here. The work is made up mostly of stencils and murals. Much of these walls are completely covered. Makes you want to walk down these streets and see it in person.
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Reclaiming Urban Landscape | Part 2
Some interesting conceptual graffiti showcased in this article, which is part of a series of articles on reclaiming urban landscapes. Artists find interesting canvases to work with, like demolished sides of buildings, storm drains, and rubble. There is some optical art on display that from certain vantage points makes 2D street art appear 3D.
Other Cool Stuff
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Molotow Masters Round 2 AFP Melbourne
This video shows some talented Melbourne graffiti artists in action. "Voltures Paints in conjunction with Molotow Premium have undertaken an exciting project known as Molotow Masters Of Art. This involves Voltures Paints sponsoring some of Australia's most respected crews to create a full scale production using Molotow Premium paint. Each crew is given 100+ cans, one weekend, and some serious heckling."
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3D Graffiti Flickr Group
There are quite a few Flickr groups on graffiti and street art. The 3D Graffiti group stands out though. It's far from the biggest group, but it has a tight focus and high quality submissions. All the images submitted are of 3D style graffiti images, which are often more interesting visually, as they seem to jump right off the walls their sprayed on. This is the link to the Preview Artwork on the left, which is of a Pig character floating over a futuristic raw meet and intestines Shish Kabob.
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Graffiti Wildstyle Tutorial
This tutorial shows tips on how to create Wild Style graffiti lettering. It points out key areas of the design and each phase of the process. There are quite a few videos on YouTube that show how to sketch graffiti tags and characters in all kinds of styles. A good workflow is to start with a sketch before jumping into Photoshop. After reviewing some of the Computer Arts tuts, you may want to look at some of these YouTube sketch video tuts.
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SAiAN's Graffiti Portfolio on Behance
There are more graffiti artists than could possibly be shown in a blog post. The artist Saian get's the nod here by being promoted in this post. There is a wide variety of work on display from this artist in the Behance portfolio section, link below. There's a good combination of 3D lettering, characters, sprayed portraits, and murals.
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Wikipedia on Graffiti
If you want to learn about the general history of graffiti then check out Wikipedia. It has an impressive amount of information, as it covers time periods of the artform and breaks it down by regions as well. The origins and growth of graffiti into mainstream art is explained. There are also plenty of links off to more graffiti resources, like the blog Fat Cap.
(FREE!) Download Picks
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Kragograff Free Graffiti Photoshop Brushes
There are some great graffiti Photoshop brushes on this site. It's not in English, but you should have no problem downloading the cool brushes. There are other freebies available as well, like grunge and DJ brushes.
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Graffiti Photoshop Brushes for High Resolution
Some nice High-Res Graffiti Brushes available on the CoreGFX site. Most of them are around 1800+ pixels wide. The brushes where created by Design Fruit, which is a good site to find more brushes at.
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UrbanFonts Free Graffiti Font Section
UrbanFonts is a well-stocked resource filled with free fonts. Their graffiti section has a selection of fonts worth reviewing and downloading. They have mostly graffiti style marker drawn fonts, like the font Eastside Motel.
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Street Tagger V5
This is version 5 of of a multi-part Photoshop freebie brush series from Hextacy on Deviantart. This download features images of graffiti tags turned into brushes.
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Graffitifonts.com Free Graffiti Font Resource
This site features a really large 3 page selection of free graffiti style fonts. They have over 150 graffiti fonts available for free download.
