An NYC Graffiti Artist Teaches Aerosol Technique in Bushwick
An hour of aerosol technique with an NYC graffiti artist, in a Bushwick studio set up for all ages and talent levels.
Graff Tours keeps a studio at 282 Meserole Street, in the heart of Bushwick Brooklyn, and sells one hour of it at a time. The company puts the arc plainly: the tips and techniques of aerosol art, from fill-ins to masterpieces, with an authentic NYC graffiti artist working alongside the room. The hour is built around a can in your hand, not a demonstration watched from a bench.
Graff Tours has run this format since 2013 and lists the class as designed for all ages and talent levels.
The same hour sells in three shapes, and they are not interchangeable. Graff Tours describes them as a mural painted straight onto the studio wall, that wall work plus an individual canvas at twenty by ten inches, or a large canvas at five feet by four. The wall-only option leaves nothing to carry out — the piece stays on the studio wall, and the canvas is a separate line on the booking. The tier is chosen at checkout.
Brooklyn Graffiti WorkshopSixty minutes at the Graff Tours studio in Bushwick. Confirmation is instant, and booking closes three hours before the start.www.viator.comWhat sixty minutes of aerosol actually covers
Spray painting rewards control before it rewards ambition. Graff Tours sells the hour as spray painting technique first, then the move from fill-ins toward masterpieces, which is an honest account of the distance involved. Fill-ins arrive inside the hour; masterpieces sit at the far end of the same vocabulary, and the class names that gap rather than pretending to close it.
Everyone starts on the wall. The operator's sequence is to spray the studio wall the way a graffiti artist would, and only then to move onto a canvas, for the two tiers that include one.
The artists whose room this is
Gabriel Schoenberg started Graff Tours in 2009, during his senior year at NYU, and still runs it as founder and manager. The graffiti class came later, after what he describes as years of requests. The roster he lists as artists in residence is what gives the hour more than instruction: Staff 161, who by the operator's account had one of the first tags to appear on a New York City subway car; LEAF WF, whose work the operator places around the JMZ stops; and The Ghost Face Mims, a Bronx painter and founder of the VBV crew.
The booking page does not assign an artist to a session, but reviewers name the same few over and over. Leaf and Ghost Face Mims come up far more often than anyone else across the review pool, and the operator has replied to one review saying Leaf has been teaching for over ten years.
Who the room is set up for
The listing rates the class as suitable for all physical fitness levels, requires that children nine and under be accompanied by an adult, and marks it not recommended for pregnant travelers. Those three conditions come from the booking page. A single zero to ninety-nine age band covers the whole booking, which puts a child and an adult on the same ticket at checkout.
Dress for overspray. Graff Tours provides gloves at all of its workshops, keeps some smocks on hand, and recommends clothes you would not mind picking up a little paint.
Two refund deadlines, not one
Booking through this listing closes three hours before the start, and confirmation comes back instantly. The listing refunds in full when you cancel at least twenty-four hours ahead, while Graff Tours runs a stricter forty-eight hour policy on bookings made with it directly. The twenty-four hour line is the one attached to the booking below.
Gratuities sit outside the price. The operator's own guidance is that tips are appreciated and never expected.
The studio is at 282 Meserole Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the class meets there rather than anywhere on the street outside. Public transport runs nearby.
Lessons go ahead rain or shine, and Graff Tours keeps the right to call off a session in genuinely dangerous weather. An hour later you walk back out onto blocks that have been painted over for decades, which is the clearest look at what the technique becomes at full scale.