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When it comes to graffiti, my favourite part about it is not painting the most visible/hottest spots, it’s exploring and painting random cutty/tucked away/hidden spots, I find it much more fun.
Here is a guide I wrote on how to find such spots. I have used these methods anywhere from Malawi to Micronesia. Finding spots vary vastly from country to country. For example, painting under bridges is great when you live somewhere with fresh clean rivers, but absolutely terrible if you live in a polluted city with open sewage canals.
All you need is a phone with the Google Maps app. We will go through real life examples of places I have visited for the purposes of this guide.
SPOT TYPE #1 WATERWAYS (bridges, drainage tunnels, canals etc…) ,
The easiest way is to fire up the maps app and look for where the blue water line crosses under roads. This often represents a bridge (although not always). The smaller the road, the less likely there is to be a bridge, I find.
Once you find a spot of interest, you can switch to the terrain satellite view or street view mode.
In this example, from looking at the street view imagery, you can guess it does indeed look like a chill bridge spot to paint, out of view from any public walkways/houses. Sometimes what you want to look at may be obscured by trucks or something, but aside from moving the marker around, you can also click “see more dates” for alternate views.
In this example, I have located an open drainage canal to explore on satellite view. Sometimes when it comes to canals, the sections of the blue line will appear and disappear, this often represents a longer tunnel.
SPOT TYPE #2 RAILWAY LINES
Some countries such as the USA have great chill walls on railway lines which remain unbuffed. Depending on the country you are in, there is often a high chance of finding various of abandoned buildings/ruins by wandering train lines. Similar to the previous examples, you can find train bridges to paint by observing where the grey railway line crosses under the road. Not every bridge will be chill to paint, but the further out of town/more rural it is, usually the better it is to paint/less likely to be buffed.
You can also find freight train layup spots this way. In the example below, I have observed a spot where in all of the 6 times it was mapped on Google Street View over the years, there were trains laid up, so it would be very likely for trains to be there if you went.
SPOT TYPE #3 HIGHWAY WALLS
Many people opt to paint on the front of highway walls like the ones below.
I prefer to paint the on the back sides, you can find much more peaceful hidden spots in nature where the walls don’t get buffed. You can search on terrain view and look for walls deep in wooded areas and try your luck at bushbashing your way there.
SPOT TYPE #4 ABANDONED BUILDINGS
You can find abandoned buildings on Google Maps by turning on terrain view and searching for dilapidated buildings. Abandoned buildings are usually less likely to be in city centers and more likely to be in the outskirts/industrial areas. Holes in the roof are a good indicator. Abandoned buildings are the most popular with urban explorers, so just searching “city name + abandoned” into Google, YouTube, Facebook or TikTok can often yield some results.
