There is some theory to a "tagger's" choice of what kind of freight car he prefers to "bomb." Smooth sided, light colored cars are the Ideal "blank canvas" for this group of individuals. Smooth-sided covered hoppers are favorites, as are boxcars and reefers.

The geographical area plays a significant role on the amount of graffiti you'll find on a car. Southern Pacific and subsidiary Golden West Service boxcars seem to be favorites for taggers if only because they're serving industries in "hotspots" for graffiti artists, namely the Bay Area and the L.A. Basin. You can find graffiti on almost any piece of rolling stock, you'll find more on cars that have a slow car unload/turnaround rate (boxcars, Gondolas), or cars that are seasonally necessary, such as reefers. Modern coal trains are constantly in motion, especially the bethgons and equivalents running constantly from Wyoming's Powder River basin to coal-fired power plants to the south. Since the cars are almost constantly in motion, the seldom receive graffiti. Flat cars have don't have sides large enough for any graffiti to be applied that would be of any artistic merit, perhaps older centerbeam flatcars would receive them, but usually the taggers remain on the ground as they spray. Tank cars aren't ideal surfaces for obvious reasons because of the visual distortion caused by the curvature of the tank itself. However, it still is fairly common to see a few tags on tank cars. Maintenance of Way equipment is pure gold, thanks to a few aforementioned factors: They sit at one site for lengthy periods of time, allowing the taggers to return multiple nights to make a "burner" which is a masterpiece of the graffiti art world, when they do move they may move to another end of the system and sit for awhile, thus spreading their visual message to another city. Passenger cars are usually kept sparkling clean, and thus rarely, if ever have even a hint of graffiti on them. Sadly, some museum gets the terrible wrath of the spray can. Depending on the museum's budget and number of staff, those poor pieces of history could just be sealing rusty portions of old equipment, or cleaned up right away.

The tutorial below describes how to do a common type of graffiti, the "throwie" which consists of one layer of outline color, usually silver or white, with a contrasting color for the filled in color. Sometimes these have backshaded letters that "pop out" at the observer in a false 3-D

way.

A very common mistake and a patently clear misconception by people who first attempt graffiti in scale without adhering to their gathered photographic reference is to use actual names and a verb such as, "Robert Smith Rules." It's very unrealistic, because it could result in the graffiti tagger being instantly recognized by the authorities and resulting in his arrest more expeditiously than if he used a pseudonym, or false name. When I mean false name, I don't mean "Marilyn Monroe" (Norma Jean Baker) or "Mel Brooks" (Melvin Kaminsky) I mean a more obscure name, idea or verb. "Zephyr", "Dream", "Blade", "Jeso", "Swek", "High", "Seen" etc. If you wish to sketch out your own scale graffiti and create your very own false name to put on your models, feel free to do so.

Tutorial 1- Black and White.