****WARNING****

This is a very photo filled post with lots of awesome graffiti. You have been warned.

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Have I got a treat for you. Recently I got an assignment from school that had me out on the streets looking for tags–aka Graffiti. Not only did I find a bunch of tags, but I hit the jackpot. I found this neat alleyway down by Queen West and Spadina in Toronto. It was a solid two blocks of edge-to-edge, corner-to-corner graffiti. I don’t even know how long I spent wandering around looking at all the awesome tags and pieces. So I decided to post what I found, in a 85 photo photo-series. I’ll keep the comments to a minimum, but I’ll just quickly explain how I’ll organized them.

I also feel like I need to make 100% sure that something is clear. I DID NOT create any of these works. I simply took photos of them. I do not want anything I say here to imply I made them, I want to give all credit to the artists. If you know who did one of these, let me know and I can credit it! Or have a chat with them about their work; that works too.

Tags

Tags are smallish signature style piece that is usually saying “Hey! I was here, and this is who I am!”. You see these all over the place; they’re probably the most common type of graffiti you’ll find.

Throw-Ups

Throw-ups are a bit bigger than tags, and are not always “signature” based. They are really quick pieces that use only one or two colours and usually consist of an outline that is quickly coloured in with lines and strokes rather than the flat colours of pieces. This is the next most commonly seen type of graffiti.

Pieces

Pieces are the big, elaborate graffiti art that you’ll find. They are usually big, bold, and time consuming. Because they are so big and take so much time, they are harder to come by than, for example, tags.