In our opinion, no artistic medium offers a better opportunity to express a PC gamer’s individuality and inappropriate sense of humor like a personal decal “spray” projected on your enemy’s spawn room wall during a multiplayer match. While Valve has made it a mostly painless process to import spray images into their Source engine-based games, the difficulty still lies in creating an original image you can be proud to vandalize next to an enemies corpse. And since no game offers more opportunities to grief friends and enemies than Left 4 Dead, we’re going to show you a flawless technique for creating your own ‘writing on the wall’, pun absolutely intended.

Time: 1.5 hours

1. Set up Your Template

You’ll need image editing software such as Photoshop or Paintshop, though less expensive (and free) alternatives such as Gimp are available that offer the same tools required for this job. For user convenience this tutorial will use Gimp, though it is important to note most modern editing programs consist of similar tools, options and terminology, so don’t worry about specificity of tools. Other programs will follow the same guidelines.

After opening Gimp, select File > New, which will bring up the New Image dialog box. All sprays have a resolution of 256x256 pixels, which you should input into the Height and Width boxes (make sure the units are set to pixels). Now in the Fill Width box, make sure you set it to Transparency. This will make the background invisible, so when you use a spray in-game you will only see the graffiti, and not a white square box. After pressing OK, you are now ready to start working on your blank image!

2. Customize GIMP

Next, let’s customize the interface to make designing our spray a little easier. Select File > Dialogs > Tool Options. This opens the Tool Options dialog box, which will change in context with the tools you select. If you would prefer to dock it with your tool selections, click the area of the Tool Options menu that says Text (if the Font Tool is selected) and drag it under the tools on the main Gimp window where it says “You can drop dockable dialogs here”. Also, open the Layers dialog box through File > Dialogs > Layers, which can be docked the same way.

3. Choose Your Graffiti Style

At this point you have a few options for designing the look of your graffiti. We recommend visiting www.dafont.com or another website that provides free-to-use user made fonts. There, you can find some great styles in the Handwriting category under Script (it is important to note each artist has conditions for using their font, usually found in a Readme file bundled with the font download). Once you’ve chosen a font, download and install it. Open My Computer > Control Panel > Fonts, then drag-and-drop the font (extracted from the .rar file using WinRAR) into the Font folder to install it. Remember the font’s name so you can easily find it for the next step!