Graffiti Tik Tok Face Art Stars

So, I’m lucky. I live near a city, namely Birmingham in the UK, which has a wealth of vivid graffiti art sprayed along the walls on, or under canal bridges, as well as having a dedicated area in Digbeth near the city centre, which just cries out to be visited, because all around this artistic hotspot, the painted drawings on its rough brickwork canvas are so rich in detail and colour!

And lots of graffiti tells us stories, be it in the form of witty caricatures, political satire, futuristic fun, or alluring comic strip takes on modern life and culture.

Having seen a range of art styles and subjects across the city, as I’ve cycled through the centre on numerous occasions, or along the many canal towpaths on its fringes, I was curious to know whether I could tell a story, using some examples of graffiti art, even if it meant turning them into Tik Tok faces, using a series of funny, or curious expressions to match song lyrics, or the essence of a fun beat, or popular song.

First thing to do was to research examples of graffiti on the Europeana website. The beauty of this curated cultural heritage collection is that you can search for images, filtering them first, basically to make sure they’re okay to use and free from potential copyright infringement! Then, if you like them, simply by setting up a free account you can add one, or more to an album, keeping it private for future reference, in effect your own micro Pinterest area.

I’ve said this before, but that’s where the fun starts, because not only was I looking for images I could use, I was comparing them to modern cultural references like Star Wars baddy, Jabba the Hutt, Simpsons characters, or even a creepy circus clown, in the hope that this would give me my ‘Eureka’ idea moment. Sadly it didn't, but in the process I did fine a series of interesting and monstrous looking faces I thought I could use to convey different moods and expressions.

Next stage was to add a bit of graffiti of my own. Quite often you see this on real life spray painted art, but sadly it’s often just a series of scrawls, which look more destructive, than constructive. My aim was to use Procreate a popular art app for the iPad and see where my brush would take me, in an inspired stream of consciousness, seeing what I could do to the images, remixing their looks to give them each a different characteristic. I even named my image animation layers in Procreate things like, ‘Scowly,’ ‘ Thinker,’ ‘Curious’ etc, so I was already working out their personalities!

In terms of how I did this, I not only added my own markings onto the faces, but also cut out eyes, mouths, shapes to rearrange, reposition them etc to change them up a bit and illustrate them as a series of differeing expressions.

Of course Tik Tok now offers up lots of different content, rather than just a mishmash of dancing videos. Plus, the music is already there for you to use, which is a bonus. Sometimes I’m lucky and just chance upon a popular song, this being the case here, as I found one which served my idea perfectly and was also under ten seconds, which makes animating any characters easier to manage, because you don’t have to create that many frames, especially if you keep the frame rate low.

My idea was to simplify the animation process even more, by just switching between the original and my revised image, for each of the five faces used and put additional time frame holds to match the music beats, or voices and lengthen the amount of time each face would show for.

As Procreate hasn’t any audio layer to animate to, I relied on listening to the track repeatedly to get a sense of timings etc. Normally I’d just screen record the song, stick it in an animation program and match the movement to the audio, but this was a more raw and intuitive way of doing it and I kind of had to guess when the character expressions needed changing, but became an interesting challenge to put into play, even if tricky to work out at times!

Below are the revised characters I created, which I then animated, using the techniques described above. The final result, well, you’ll have to decide whether it does indeed convey the story of the song in question, but even the music seems satirical in nature with a quirky beat and title of, ‘It’s Over!’ It even has a laughing phrase at the end.

Time will tell whether these graffiti expressive faces launch into the viral video stratosphere as sometimes happens on these platforms. This was certainly true for me with another Europeana illustration I animated, a Bill McConkey satirical take on ironing skin, which to date, has been viewed nearly 30,000 times!

https://www.tiktok.com/@cavedawes/video/7003760533908262149

However, even if they don’t reach those dizzying heights of views accumulated, it shows that by using some simple art remixing techniques, you can create new characters, ones which could be used in a comic strip story, or even as I’ve done, put them in a Tik Tok music video!