This artist creates negative murals that appear when you invert the image

I guess most of us have seen graffiti incorporated in photography as a backdrop. But, Colombian artist Sepc has found another interesting way of combining photography and graffiti art. He creates murals that reveal their true colors only when you snap a photo of them and invert it. Sepc shares a bit about his process with DIYP, as well as a couple of photos of these “negative murals.”

The idea behind the project comes from a technical challenge, which Sepc says is one of the main pillars of his work. He combined the technique he already uses with an innovative idea and came up with this project.” I think that in the world of urban art it is not enough to be good; we must reinvent ourselves constantly,” Sepc tells DIYP.

“It is the same process as a normal mural, the sketch is made and the volume is generated with the colors. The first layer is vinyl paint for the background, the other is spray paint and, depending on the size of the space, I can take between a day and a week to do it.”

The curiosity to explore and discover new ideas is one of the bases of Sepc’s work. For this project, he relied on something that we learned way back in school: the chromatic circle. “Each color has an adjacent or complementary color that is the inverse color of the other,” the artist adds. He wanted to get the viewer more involved than with regular graffiti art. So, in order to really see the murals, the viewer needs to photograph it and “reveal” the image by inverting it. In some way, Sepc is joining graffiti art with the digital age and relating it to technology.

Here are a few more photos of Sepc’s “negative murals:”

Personally, I enjoy seeing good graffiti and murals. There are plenty of them in Belgrade, the city which I often visit and where I used to live. But since I’m a photographer, I really like it how Sepc brought graffiti and photography together. If you’d like to see more of his work, make sure to follow him on Facebook and Instagram.