Oliver Gray

As I mentioned before, graffiti became a huge interest of mine around the time I was eighteen. This was mainly due to a trip I took to Montréal, a city that, at least the area I was in, was covered in graffiti and murals. This may be due to the Montreal mural festival, but I’m not totally sure! I wouldn’t say it was an obsession, but all of my drawings turned into graffiti sketches, and now I realise that what I was doing was blackbook graffiti marker sketches. Anyways, after receiving the prompt from my sister, I made this little doodle in my High School notebook, which can be seen in the second image of this post. I liked it enough so I used it as the foundation for this piece. I was lucky enough to have paint markers by that time as well. I say lucky because a friend of mine, a very talented artist who actually studied art, told me that it was the addition of the white lines that really made the piece pop. That was done at the very end I remember. I’m also happy with the colour scheme and content within the letters, I don’t know what inspired that, but most likely graffiti I had seen.

This piece was done during a trip to California with my family. The trip was a gift from my Mom for graduating High School; she moved out there when she was younger. This drawing was intended to look like waves, and/or a shark. Not sure if this worked by hey! 🙂 The white highlights were done with a paintbrush after returning home, to Redding, Connecticut, USA 🙂🖌 This was a very very fun part of my life… right before summer 2014.