Wk 9 Art Experience – Graffiti Writing

This week was the first time that I felt like I was actually creating legitimate art. Obviously my piece won’t look like someone’s who has more experience, but it was really fun to experiment with the spray paint. I got to use a variety of colors and even though it was my first time even using spray paint I felt good about the results. It fit in with all the other graffiti there. Also, Venice Beach is beautiful and I’m always happy to go there for any reason.

Creating bubble letters was more difficult than I thought it would be. After watching the tutorial videos I felt more lost than ready to make my own. When I actually got to the beach, I realized that my colors didn’t really contrast enough to get the effect that I wanted. The orange and the pink just ended up looking the same. If I were to do this again then I would definitely buy different colors, but I was limited by the options they had to choose from at the store. Plus for some reason I thought they would look better together than they did. Another difficulty was how far away to hold the can. Mine sprayed in a straight line, and if I got too close it would cause a dripping effect. I liked this but it wasn’t originally what I was going for.

The best part was getting to paint with my friend Maria who is in the 2:30 class. She is super awesome and we got to create a mini mural together. Flowers seemed like the easiest thing to paint since it doesn’t really require precision, so she outlined them in her colors and I went over them in my more vibrant colors. We switched between each other’s paint colors to do the different outlines. We realized that the background needed to pop more, so we added a gray background afterwards and then signed our initials. In one of the photos, you can see her initials that she did earlier, the MJR in the back. My name that I did earlier is to our right, but not shown in the picture. Overall, it was a really great day!

I also went to Small World Books, but I couldn’t find any zines! I was definitely disappointed. Maybe I missed something? It was a very cool bookstore though and I will definitely return on my next trip to Venice.