Oliver Gray

The symbol on the manhole cover in this one was mean to be like light coming from the underground; the sun of the underground or something like that. 🙂



“Dog The Cat”, 2016 😌

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.

Growing up outside of New York City, I can remember visiting my Grandmother very often. The rock style letters for this piece were very easy. This is because any mistake just looks like a crumbling piece of rock and I think it looks nice. I’m also satisfied with this colour scheme, purple and green, kind of Barney-like. Not sure if they are opposite colours or whatnot, though I should probably know from school 😅. The graffiti on the bridge says “Darth Vander Tramp” definitely NOT “Trump”… all the way back in 2014, sheesh. I think the sunset came out well, as well as the sunset strip around the letters, kind of like an embroidered hoodie. The buoy also brings back some great eerie memories from LaHave, Nova Scotia, Canada. The second piece in this post is a prerequisite I did for the prompt, just to get some ideas going. I may have been inspired by the GameCube game “Cars”, Route 66, The Doors, the open road, etc… I’m also pretty sure I misspelt “Brooklyn” in the prerequisite 😂. Didn’t misspell it in the finished piece though!! Lucky.. 🙂

This piece was a kind of “happy accident” as Bob Ross might say. Towards the end of High School, my sister asked me to make her a 4-piece wall set using her old neighborhood, Crown Heights, as inspiration. I already had this piece, as well as another one (which is in my previous post). Anyways, after a while it dawned on me that these two pieces looked like they said “Ollivander” together. This is a nickname of mine, and was totally perfect for this prompt 😂. I may have actually attempted to write “Oliver” for this piece, but then just let it go in it’s own direction, but I don’t really remember. 😌

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.

🙂

Here’s a marker graffiti sketch! Another one from 2014. I was and still am happy with this one. I think this was right around the same time or after I visited Montréal and was blown away by the graffiti I saw there. Both in terms of amount and the quality. This was done with “On The Run” markers + a notebook that I got while visiting, and I think I was into around this time! 🙂

Here is a post of my process; this is what this logo looked like before I added color, pretty happy with how it came out ultimately. 🙂