That’s right kid-os I made an assingment. Its called Vicarious Graffiti.

Unfortunately I messed up the post a little bit and the example photo does not appear. What follows will be a tutorial of sorts for how to accomplish this assignment, in which I will describe how I made the attached picture titled “Charlie Graffiti.”

First off you have to get you starting image. Some people posses the uncanny ability to hand draw stencil like images, to which I will say “Good for you, skip the following sentences but come back later on.” Now, once you get your image/idea the next phase is to upload it into some kind of photo editing software. I used pixlr.com because that’s what I’m most familiar with (even though I’m trying to become more adept  with GIMP).

you’re all thinking it.

After I loaded the image into pixlr I first started messing with the brightness and contrast. Generally speaking, most pictures you use will be too bright and as such will mess with the steps to come later; however to what extent you darken is up to your own judgment. Additionally its always a good idea to increase the contrast to help define the image’s lines. Once this is done you’re going to want to de-saturate the image, I don’t know why but these things always work better when done in black and white.

By now you should have black and white image, that’s a little darker than usual with some pretty good line definition. This next step differs depending on what editing program you use, but I know that in pixlr is called “posterize.” It going to ask you how many layers you want, and again this part is up to your own judgment. Each image is different so don’t be afraid to play around a little.

should look about like this

After this things get pretty easy. Once that filter is on, go back and click “threshold.” This will generate the classic stencil look for your image. After this, simply find a picture of some building or wall that’s pretty blank. Add you new stencil image as a new layer to this building pic. It’s easier if you start big and go small, so before you transform the stencil image to fit on the wall try and eliminate as much of the layer’s background as you can with out touching any of the image itself. What you can’t get just make it match the building’s color.

Now for the fun part. You can now scale down, move, mess with your computer made stencil image so that it looks like its actually part of the wall. Add some text with yours like I did. Mine is picture of Charlie Kelly with the words “Carol! Carol!”. Sort of a joke for the fans of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Enjoy and have fun.