Style combination · Contrasts
Graffiti × Stencil Street Art
Both use spray paint in the street, but graffiti makes the writer's name a freehand, many-coloured letter-sculpture with 3D blocks and fades; stencil art sprays a reproducible photographic picture in black. Decide which one the brief needs before mixing them.
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Stencil Street Art
- Type from Graffiti
- Colour from Stencil Street Art
- Form from Graffiti
- Composition from Stencil Street Art
- Surface from Graffiti
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Stencil Street Art
Pictures cut rather than drawn: a photograph is reduced to two or three flat tones, cut into card and sprayed onto a wall, usually uninvited, so one hard-edged figure appears in the street, in black with at most one accent colour. Foreshadowed by Ernest Pignon-Ernest's Hiroshima silhouettes (1966), it took shape in 1978 in Amsterdam's punk scene (Hugo Kaagman) and São Paulo (Alex Vallauri), was taken up in Paris by Blek le Rat in the early 1980s, and went global after 2000 with Banksy's satirical stencils and Shepard Fairey's Obey posters and Obama 'Hope' portrait.
Special Elite; Stencil Street Art used Hand-cut stencil capitals, bridged where the counters would otherwise fall out and Industrial and military marking stencils
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Stencil Street Art, with a counter-accent from Graffiti. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Stencil Street Art
-
#e6e2d8ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#d3212daccent · 18% -
#1f3a4daccent · 14% -
#00a3e0accent · 10% -
#8f8a82accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e6e2d8;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #d3212d;
--accent-2: #1f3a4d;
--accent-3: #00a3e0;
--accent-4: #8f8a82;
--font-display: "Sedgwick Ave Display", cursive;
--font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}Use it with care
Stencil Street Art: Spraying a wall without the owner's consent is vandalism or criminal damage in most jurisdictions, so get permission or a legal wall; a brand faking street stencils is no exception (IBM's 2001 'Peace, Love, and Linux' sidewalk stencils led to arrests and more than US$120,000 in fines). Most stencils start from someone else's photograph, as the AP's dispute over Fairey's Hope poster showed (settled 2011): shoot or license the source image, and do not pass off a pastiche as a Banksy, whose work is authenticated only by Pest Control. Do not use photographs of real victims, or places of real suffering such as separation walls and war ruins, as props for a brand or a joke; by Banksy's own account, a Palestinian man at the West Bank barrier told him they did not want the wall made beautiful.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Graffiti
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Put a single tag or throw-up over a strict Swiss grid to stage the clash between institutional order and a street voice.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Use graffiti as the foil to corporate identity: a painted name over a logo makes the ownership of public space visible.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Pair letter-pieces with Ben-Day comic panels and bold outlines, as 1980s gallery graffiti often did, for a street-meets-gallery look.
- Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks) Pairs well · Streetwear grew out of New York hip-hop dress; pair a set geometric wordmark with a hand-drawn graffiti piece for a back print, but keep the logo flat and centred so the tag reads as the decoration and the box as the brand.
- Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto) Contrasts · Both write names on walls, and Pesquisa FAPESP lists hip-hop among the 1980s influences on pixação, but graffiti builds the letter into a coloured, outlined, three-dimensional piece with characters, while pixação keeps a flat black straight letter in level rows and goes for height. Brazilian law since 2011 tolerates graffiti made with the owner's consent and keeps pichação a crime, so decide which one the brief needs.
- Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) Pairs well · Guochao's streetwear wing already borrows hip-hop lockups; treat a brush character as the tag and keep the heritage palette.
- Black Lives Matter Street Murals Contrasts · Graffiti writers paint their own names on walls and trains, uninvited and in letters few outsiders can read; these murals lay one shared, legible slogan on the road, usually with the city's permission. Let a writer fill one letter, as Sam Sneke did in Seattle, without turning the slogan into a piece.
- Matatu & Nganya Art Pairs well · The source of its names, catchphrases and heroes: take graffiti's wildstyle and bubble lettering for the vehicle name and keep the matatu's photoreal portrait as the focal point.
With Stencil Street Art
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Stencil art borrows the repetition and reach of branding to mock it, as OBEY parodies advertising; a black figure sprayed beside a clean corporate mark makes the question of who owns public space visible.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Stencilling grew out of punk (Kaagman's fanzine scene, Crass's Underground slogans); pair a sprayed figure with xerox collage and ransom-note lettering for a flyer or sleeve with the same anti-authority edge.
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Fairey's Obey posters borrow Soviet propaganda's red, black and cream and its heroic portrait; give a stencilled face a red bar and a one-word slogan for agitprop with a knowing twist.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Both repeat an appropriated photograph through a stencil; add Pop's serial grid or one off-register accent colour to turn a single street figure into a print edition.
- Lambe-Lambe Posters (Brazilian Paste-Up Street Posters) Pairs well · Both descend from or sit beside graffiti culture in the street; pair a pasted series with a painted element only where a project needs both.
- Chinese Paper-Cut (Jianzhi) Pairs well · Both depend on bridges that hold every island of the design to the sheet; give a spray stencil the paper-cut's folded symmetry and saw-tooth texture.
- BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Contrasts · Stencils bring their own imagery to the wall; BUGA UP takes the wall's existing imagery and turns it.
- Extinction Rebellion Graphics Pairs well · ESP spread the symbol as a street artist before XR adopted it, chalking it on Brick Lane and putting up posters and tiles around East London; pair XR's one-colour emblem and short slogans with stencil street art's hard-edged sprayed figures for walls and pavements.