Graffiti letters for your name, in seconds

What are graffiti letters?

Graffiti letters are hand-styled letters made to stand out on a wall: thick outlines, bold color, 3D blocks, highlights and drips. Writers bend the shape of each letter so the whole word reads as one piece rather than a row of separate characters. The style grew up on New York's subway trains in the 1970s and is now used everywhere from sketchbooks to posters, logos and social media.

Graffiti lettering comes in a handful of main forms. From quickest to most complex:

• Tag: a writer's name in one color, written fast like a signature. The personal way someone writes it is their handstyle.
• Throw-up: quick bubble letters with a fill and an outline, usually in two or three colors. See throw-up letters.
• Piece: short for masterpiece. A full-color painting with fill-ins, 3D, highlights and often a background. A big, polished piece is called a burner.
• Blockbuster: huge square letters built to be read from far away, sometimes painted with rollers.
• Wildstyle: interlocking letters with arrows and extensions, hard to read unless you know the word. See wildstyle letters.

The generator above covers these plus Old English, stencil and 3D letters. The graffiti styles guide compares every style side by side.

What are the parts of a graffiti letter?

Most graffiti letters are built from the same layers, in the same order: a skeleton, an outline, a fill-in, a 3D block or shadow, highlights, and extras such as drips and arrows. Once you know the names, tutorials are easier to follow and you can see why one piece looks finished while another looks flat.

• Skeleton: the thin pencil letter underneath, used to plan spacing, lean and how letters overlap.
• Outline: the line around each letter. On a wall it is often painted last, to cut the edges clean.
• Fill-in: the color inside the outline. Fades, stripes, bubbles and patterns go here.
• 3D block or shadow: a solid shape pushed out to one side so the letters look thick or lifted off the wall.
• Highlights: small white strokes on the side the light comes from.
• Extras: drips, arrows, stars, crowns and bars. A few add energy; too many make the word hard to read.
• Background: a cloud, bubbles or a block of color behind the letters that holds the word together.

The graffiti glossary explains these and other terms writers use.

How do you draw graffiti letters?

Start in pencil on paper. Write your word in plain capitals, give each letter thickness, push the letters close so they touch or overlap, then ink the outline, fill it with color and add the 3D side and highlights last. Bubble letters are the easiest style to learn this way.

Practice in a blackbook (a graffiti sketchbook) and on legal walls or with the owner's permission, never on someone else's property. The step-by-step drawing guide shows all six stages on one word, and every page in the graffiti alphabet has tips for that letter. Want a reference? Type your word in the generator, download it, and redraw it by hand until the shapes feel natural.

Which colors work best for graffiti letters?

Use one strong fill color or a two-color fade, a dark outline, and a 3D side in a darker shade of the fill. Contrast between fill and outline matters more than how many colors you use. Reliable pairs: yellow into orange, white into gray (chrome), pink into purple, and light blue into blue, each with a black outline.

Writers often put a background in a color opposite the fill on the color wheel, such as a purple cloud behind yellow letters, so the word jumps forward. Chrome with a black outline is the classic throw-up look because it is fast to paint and easy to read. The generator's Color tab has 13 ready-made schemes plus custom top, bottom and outline colors, so you can test a combination before you buy paint or markers.

How do you spell graffiti?

Graffiti is spelled G-R-A-F-F-I-T-I: two Fs and one T. The most common misspellings are "grafitti", "graffitti", "grafiti" and "graphiti". An easy way to remember it: double the F, not the T.

The word comes from Italian. A graffito is a scratched drawing or inscription, from graffiare, "to scratch", and graffiti is its plural. In everyday English, graffiti covers one piece or many and usually takes a singular verb ("the graffiti was fresh"). Graffito is rarely used outside art history. People who paint it call themselves writers; "graffiti artist" is the more common term outside the scene.