Italian Artist Creates Negative Graffiti that Reveals True Colors When Inverted

One of the coolest types of graffiti we’ve ever seen is Gifiti, where an artist paints several slightly different pieces in the same spot, photographing each piece, and then puts the photos together into a final animated piece of street art. It’s downright amazing and the time required is mind-boggling.

But as cool as Gifiti is, we might have just found our new favorite photography-inspired graffiti genre: negative graffiti.

Negative Graffiti is exactly what it sounds like: the artist painstakingly creates the graffiti in negative so that taking a picture and inverting the image produces a color-accurate positive.

The examples below by Italian graffiti artist Cheone are some of the best we’ve found online (and gotten permission to share):

It doesn’t take the same amount of work as something like, say, the largest piece of gifiti in the world did. But negative graffiti takes a whole other set of skills that are equally impressive, if not quite as time-consuming.

The two pieces above are the only negative graffiti tags that Cheone has done, but you can find a couple more examples of the style here and here.

Image credits: Photographs and art by Cheone and used with permission