Berlin Street Art: Graffiti

If I'm going to talk about street art in some detail, I should first explain what it is, and how it relates to graffiti. Graffiti is often just thought of as quick tagging, and as being pretty ugly, but in truth graffiti is really anything anything typography-based (it's just words). Usually this is just the name of the artist or the crew (group the artist belongs to), but it can be one of many different styles, some of which are quite artistic. I've already given a lot of examples of street art, but here is a quick rundown of graffiti since I haven't really talked about it. Since I often don't take pictures of much graffiti, I'm going to have to resort to some pictures from other cities, or just explain things for some of these.

Tag - this is the basic, single line signature that most people are familiar with. It's easy, fast, and often done by kids starting out. Making this awkward is the fact that tags are so boring that I don't have a single picture of one other than ones that just happen to be in the picture with more impressive things. I really should have planned this out better and taken pictures of each style in the city today! I'll resort to wiki commons for this one.

Throw-up - the next level up, a throw-up is normally two colours with one as an outline and another as the filling.

Piece - these are the complicated and often very artistic side of graffiti. Sometimes the lettering can get very entangled and abstract, which is classified as the sub-genre wildstyle.

Heaven Spots - graffiti that is written on high, hard to reach places. Because of their locations they can often stay in place for a very long time, but they can also be very dangerous to make. Painting them is often done with paint rollers, but the second example here was done by a woman on a rope being held from above.

I'm not going to get into different graffiti mediums much, but in addition to painting buildings and walls trains are of course popular, and in some cities (especially Paris) vans and trucks are common targets.

Now that graffiti is out of the way I can post more on the pure art stuff that I prefer over the next few days.