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From a scribble to a dripping spray tag

Oct 13
6 min read

Draw a name on a sticker, paint it in Hello My Name Is, then spray and drip it in Random Effects.

An orange 3D graffiti tag with a dark orange outline, ringed by fine spray speckle, with thick runs of dark orange paint hanging from every edge

The Monkey tag after the whole chain: Colour fill PNG from Hello My Name Is, then Spray dots at Keep picture 1, then Drips at its defaults. 2,480 × 1,488 px.

Monkey is the piece I published from Hello My Name Is: a name drawn once by hand, lifted into depth, orange with a dark edge. It looks finished, and it is still too clean for a tag. Real graffiti has overspray around it and paint that ran before it dried. Random Effects has both now, Spray dots and Drips, and they chain, so I took the Monkey colour export through them.

The two apps are hmni.krshi27.art and effects.krshi27.art. Nothing needs installing; the only thing that travels between them is a file.

How this one got made

One scribble on a sticker

In Hello My Name Is I drew on the white body of the sticker with the mouse, in a few strokes. Every stroke is kept as drawn, wobble included, and that wobble is what survives all the way to the end.

A red HELLO my name is sticker with a hand-drawn name in thin black lines: two humps, a long crossing bar and loops, with tall strokes running above and below

The drawing in Tag view, before anything else. Each line is one stroke of the mouse.

Colour it in Hello My Name Is

Press 3D and the strokes become ribbons. This time I also switched on Colour, a section that paints the tag like a graffiti piece: a fill with a fade, a darker outline, a keyline and highlights along the edges. It needs Fill faces on, and it only changes pixels, not the model.

The sticker in 3D view: the name as orange ribbons turned so their sides show, with a dark orange outline and thin white highlights, on a pale grey body under the red HELLO band

The sticker PNG with Colour on.

Three files come out of the download button, and each has a different job:

  • the sticker PNG above, for posting as it is;

  • the Colour fill PNG, the colour piece alone on white at 2,480 px on the long edge, which is what goes into Random Effects;

  • the Outline SVG, the tag as seen with hidden lines removed, for plotters and print shops.

The Colour fill PNG: the orange tag with a dark orange outline and a pale highlight line, on a plain white ground, cropped at the edges of the frame

The Colour fill PNG. No sticker, no lines, and white all around, which is exactly what Spray dots wants as paper.

The Outline SVG drawn as thin black lines on white: the same tag as a wireframe, with the hidden edges removed

The Outline SVG, rasterised here for the page. It is the line work of the same piece.

Spray it: Keep picture at 1

Open Random Effects and upload the Colour fill PNG under Upload image. Find Spray dots. Left at its defaults it rebuilds the whole picture from five colours of droplets, which is a Warhol look and not what I wanted: the tag should stay a tag. Keep picture is the slider for that. At 1 every shape stays exactly as drawn and the spray only lands around it, the mist past the edge and the speckle on the paper. The other values are the defaults (5 colours, Dot size 1).

The orange tag with a halo of fine dark orange speckle around every edge and a few larger drops further out; the shapes themselves are unchanged

Spray dots at Keep picture 1. Compare with the fill above: the letters have not moved, but the paper around them is now spattered.

This step does something that does not show. Overlapping droplets add up to a thickness of paint, and that map goes along to the next effect.

Drip it: the paint that is there runs

Drips treats the picture as wet paint on a canvas that is tilted, and lets it run down. Because Spray dots left a thickness map, Drips reads it: thick paint starts wetter and runs further, thin paint hardly moves, and the paper under the edge is a little wet from the overspray. I changed nothing from the defaults, and the result is the picture at the top of the post. Runs form where a colour meets the white paper, and wherever the dark outline sits on the orange.

I tried the other order as well, and it is worth knowing why I did not keep it. Drips on its own has no thickness map to read, so it treats the whole picture as wet paint.

The orange tag with long drips running from the outline, with no spray halo; the runs are longer and more regular than in the sprayed version

Drips alone on the same Colour fill PNG, defaults. The runs are longer and there is no speckle around the letters, so it reads as clean paint, not a can.

A second tag: the whole chain, with the numbers

The Monkey needed two moves. A second tag, a skateboard-graffiti one in blue, went through five, and Random Effects writes every step and its values into the PNG it exports, so I can give you the real numbers and not my memory of them. The order is Spray dots, Drips, Quick wash, Segment, Lithograph, in that order, each applied to the result of the one before.

The sticker with a blue 3D graffiti tag in tall, spiky letters, a mid blue outline, a dark navy shadow side and white highlights, on the pale body under the red HELLO band

The tag in Hello My Name Is, 3D view with Colour on: a pale-to-teal fade on the letters, a mid blue outline, white highlights.

The same blue tag alone on white: fade fill, dark teal outline, navy side faces and thin white highlights, with no sticker around it

The Colour fill PNG, the file that goes into Random Effects. The Outline SVG (the line work, for plotters) is not used in this chain.

1. Spray dots: nine colours, a fine mist, half the picture kept

Colours 9 (default 5), Dot size 0.7 (default 1), Keep picture 0.5 (default 0). More colours keep the fade in the letters from collapsing into a few flat bands; smaller dots make the mist fine; a Keep of 0.5 is halfway between a rebuilt picture and a tag where only the paint around the shapes is new. Everything else is at its default: Ink 1, Overspray 0.1, Colour mixing 0.5, Vividness 0.4, Streaks 0.2, Spray direction 0, white paper.

The blue tag rebuilt from spray speckle: the fade is made of dots, there is a fine halo of speckle around it, and the outline is still crisp

Step one on its own, re-run here from the logged values. The halo and the grain inside the fade are the spray.

2. Drips: finer, thinner, shorter than the defaults

Detail 768 (default 512) and Drip thickness 0.4 (default 0.45) give thinner and finer drips; Run time 900, Fluidity 1.3, Tilt 70, Direction 90, Paint load 0.3 and Wet edge 0.03 stay at the defaults, so the paint runs straight down for the same time as before. Uneven paint is 1.2 and Wet paper is off.

3. Quick wash, as a softener

Quick wash at its defaults is the fastest watercolour effect: a soft blur with no paper texture. After Drips it rounds the speckle and the runs into one painted surface.

The blue tag with black overspray dots, thin dark edges and long blue runs hanging from the letters, softened into one painted surface

The export after the first three steps, signed in the corner. The drips come from the thick outline, and the black speckle around the letters comes from Spray dots.

4 and 5. Segment, then Lithograph

Segment at its defaults (Scale 10, Sigma 1, Min size 10) flattens the picture into solid-colour regions, which hands the next step flat fields to separate. Lithograph then splits the picture into six inks, pulls them toward dusty pastels (Pastel 0.6), draws a brown outline (Outline 0.6), puts crayon grain on the stone (Grain 0.35) and lets the plates miss each other a little (Misregistration 0.3), on cream paper (#f0e6d0). All of these are the defaults: I did not touch the dialog.

The blue tag as a vintage print: muted blues in flat plates, a brown outline, black speckle, runs of paint and a few slivers of paper at the edges, on cream paper

The last step. The same drips and speckle, now printed in six inks on cream paper.

Set it beside the step before it: the letters, the speckle and the runs are where they were, but the blue has gone dusty, the outline is brown and the ground is paper. Lithograph keeps the composition and changes how it is printed, from a sprayed wall to a poster of one.

Why the order is Spray, then Drips

Each step takes whatever the last one left. Spray first gives Drips a thickness map and a damp edge to work with, which is why the runs start from the speckled outline. Segment and Lithograph go last because they flatten the colours: done before Drips, they would give the paint fewer colours to run. Revert last takes back a step if you want to try another order.

From screen to object

Under Downloads, tick the terms once and PNG gives you the finished picture, signed in the corner. If you want the tag as paper and not pixels, Hello My Name Is has its own order a print for the colour piece, and the original, unsprayed Monkey is here.

Other moves, one line each

  • Halftone in Lithograph prints in screen dots instead of grain; it is 0 above.

  • Spray direction sets which way the streaks of the spray point; I left it at 0.

  • Outline SVG can go into Random Effects too, and brings its own paint thickness, so Drips knows where the lines are.

Your turn

Take one step off the end and compare: Lithograph on, then off. Draw a name in Hello My Name Is, switch on Colour, take the Colour fill PNG to Random Effects, and give it Spray dots at Keep picture 1 and then Drips. If you want to show me what ran, send me what you made; I'll ask before I show it anywhere. Next, Finish any app's export in three moves goes on to grain, grade and blend.

 
 
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