Both Year 7 and Year 8 had the pleasure of visiting the Digbeth Custard Factory to have a graffiti experience with Matt and Jack from Graffitiartist.com. We completed various activities and we even did a tour, showing the different types of graffiti found in Digbeth.

Our first activity was sketching out our original design, which would soon be interpreted onto a canvas. Most of the class sketched out their names and used a graffiti style. Matt and Jack both showed us how to do this, and the whole class managed to sketch out their design. I coloured mine in orange and used a black felt-tip to make the letter seem more vibrant.

After this, our class was invited on a tour with Matt and Jack. In this tour, we viewed different graffiti artworks painted by Inky and other famous artists. As well as this, during the tour, we learnt about the difference between good and bad types of graffiti. For example, painting on the sides of bridges is a bad style of graffiti as it is very dangerous and illegal. On the contrary, doing graffiti in a creative, legal way is a good way of painting graffiti. Our tour concluded with a visit to the graffiti shop. Here we saw lots of different colours of spray paint. We also saw different paintings, one was priced at £700! We then returned to transfer our original designs onto the canvases.

When we returned, we completed two activities; one was to complete our canvases by painting them with paint pens and the other was to try graffiti art ourselves! I like the way I coloured my canvas as my method of painting Magenta around the sides made the letters bold and vibrant.

Now, my favourite activity was when we had the chance to try graffiti ourselves, I found it easier than expected. We just had to be cautious to not spray paint into our eyes. As a result, we created a fabulous ‘HALLFIELD’ graffiti artwork.

Before we left the centre, we took multiple pictures of the paintings, as well as the canvases.

It was nearly lunchtime, so we departed from the graffiti centre. We once again thanked both Matt and Jack before departing back to Hallfield School, just in time for lunch.

A few more comments from the day:

“The paintings were brilliant! The most enjoyable part of the day was creating the actual graffiti. We painted “Hallfield” on a wall in the factory. This a work by all of us!” – Leo

“My time at Graffitiartist.com was amazing… The Spider-Man graffiti was my favourite piece of art! We got to spray paint underneath the bridge at the custard factory and I was very proud of my work.” – Zeeshaan

“The graffiti workshop was a rare opportunity for all of us to enjoy spray painting and not only that, but we were also able to make and colour in our own canvas! This was awesome because mine was very brightly coloured and very personal to me.” – Ibrahim