Faust’s Snow Calligraphy: Hand Lettering on New York’s Parked Cars

After a New York snowfall, some lucky drivers find more than a white windscreen. For several winters the anonymous graffiti artist and letterer Faust has traced flowing calligraphy into the snow on parked cars, turning bonnets, rear windows and windscreens into pages of hand-drawn script that last only until the next thaw.

Who is Faust, the New York snow calligrapher?

Faust is a New York graffiti artist who keeps his real name private. On the street he is known for elegant hand-lettered tags and for stickers on newspaper boxes across the city. His style mixes classical calligraphy with contemporary urban lettering, and it has carried him well beyond the street.

He has received the Art Directors Club’s Young Guns award and Type Directors Club awards of excellence. Juxtapoz named him one of its top graffiti artists to know, and The New Yorker listed him among the calligraphy stars of Instagram. His work was shown in the Le Tag exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, he collaborated with the Graffiti Research Lab on a project at the Museum of Modern Art, and he has produced pieces for the Museum of the City of New York and for clients such as Nike, Samsung, Spotify, Comedy Central and Fabergé.

Snow script on parked cars

The snow pieces grew out of a simple impulse. “I believe everyone has an affinity for writing in the snow as a child,” Faust says. Most people lose that urge as they grow up; he never did, and by 2015 he had spent four winters drawing on snow-covered cars around the city.

The messages are short: his own name, winter phrases and inspirational lines, including quotes from Disney’s Frozen. He published the series on Behance under the title Snow Script.

Reverse graffiti: drawing by taking away

Snow lettering belongs to the family of “reverse graffiti”, art made by removing material instead of adding paint. Each stroke pushes snow aside and reveals the dark glass or paintwork beneath, so the letters appear as dark lines on a white ground. The untouched snow between strokes matters as much as the strokes themselves: it keeps a big loop from swallowing the smaller letters around it.

Because nothing is applied, the work leaves no trace once the owner brushes the car off or the sun comes out. The thick-and-thin contrast that calligraphers create with a broad-nibbed pen comes here from varying the width of each stroke through the snow.

Try snow lettering yourself

• Use your own car or a surface you have permission to draw on.
• Light, fresh snow a few centimetres deep gives the cleanest edges; heavy wet snow smears.
• Practise on paper first. Sketch the word and its flourishes so you know where each loop will land.
• Leave space around the word. Generous margins make the lettering read clearly in a photograph.
• Photograph it quickly, ideally in soft daylight, before wind or melting softens the lines.

For another view of the same city under snow, see Vivienne Gucwa’s Snow-Covered New York: A City Seen in Quiet Moments. Winter makes its own car-shaped art in Ice-Storm Bumper Shells Left Behind by Parked Cars.

Related reading

• Marcel Landry’s Snow Tunnel to His Car in Summerside
• An Edmonton Rainbow Ice Igloo Built by Family and Friends
• Ten Ice and Snow Designs: Hotels, Sculptures and Experimental Spaces
• Brendan Schaffer’s Snow Campfire: Flames Sculpted from Winter Snow
• Jay Venini’s Backyard Luge: A Sochi-Inspired Family Project
• An Ontario Ice Fort Built One Batch at a Time

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