How to Create Your Graffiti

How to Create Your Graffiti How to Create Your Graffiti In this article we shall know more about how to create graffiti fonts on your own. Graffiti artists around the world are busy creating their own letter forms and artistic glyphs and are trying to make them more exciting and interesting. Supposing you have your own style of graffiti, try turning it into a font and you can make your art visible to the entire world online. Though the process is a bit difficult but with some practice and a passion to make your art form famous you can surely flaunt your graffiti style with your own graffiti font. The step by step guide given below can help you in making the task easy and simple:

You have to begin by designing your letter forms. This can be done by writing out the characters separately. However while doing this one has to keep certain things in mind. Remember that the complete font would need more than just the letters A-Z. You have to think about the method of handling the upper case letters versus the lower ones. You also have to keep in mind the accents, punctuation characters etc. Another very important thing is to think about ligatures. Ligatures are like connections between letters that allow one letter to flow into another. Ligatures are an integral part of graffiti style. However ligatures usually are dependent upon the specific combinations of letters and this makes them tricky to include in a font.
The next step is scanning your letters. This is the point where your art moves from being physical to virtual. The letters have to scanned at a reasonable resolution that later makes things easier during the conversion process. However one has to remember that the resolution in which one scans the artwork isn’t the same in which the letters are going to get printed later. Setting the resolution too low can make you lose some of your finer detail work. It is advised that you scan the letters individually or a whole sheet at once and then separate them later while doing the graphics program.
Now we have to convert the scans to outlines. You can notice that while you scan the letters, they get visible as bitmap type graphic images. They are still not letters rather they are pictures of letters. Now you have to convert them into postscript outlines. It is advised that you use Adobe Illustrator while doing this because its Live Trace feature is uniquely designed to do this. After the conversion process you can see the letters as outlines studded with small adjustment handles.
Now one has to load these particular outlines into a font. For doing this one will need a font creation and editing program. The usual program for this purpose is the Fontographer. You can also use any other program that suits the purpose. It basically allows the user to specify which outline represents which character. It is more or less a copying and pasting kind of an activity in which you put the right graphics in the right boxes. After doing so, turn the program loose and allow it to convert the outlines into a usable font.
The final step is testing the font by opening up word processor and trying out how the font works. Cross check all the characters and combinations. You have your own graffiti font ready to be used!