Elicser and his buddy Mediah are hanging out behind Danforth Collegiate, watching as about 20 masked teens pull out spray cans and start painting.
"You need a little more red in here," Elicser instructs Erica Morris, 17. "Maybe change the cap to get a thinner stream."
Ms. Morris steps back and cocks her head of punky red hair to look at the work -- a red wildflower in full bloom. "I think graffiti is really beautiful," she says, removing the painter's mask to reveal a grinning pixie face. "It's so sad when people are all against it. Being able to have it on the streets is part of the culture."
Ms. Morris is no delinquent. She is one of several students who gathered at Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute this week to participate in Groove and Graffiti, a program designed to teach the art of spray-painting.
It comes a few weeks after the city implemented tough new regulations to force property owners to clean up graffiti within six days or have the city do it for them and have the cost added to their tax bill.
"We're promoting doing it legally," says Mediah, a member of Press Pause, the Toronto arts collective that ran the event. "We don't condone vandalism."
But the link between graffiti and vandalism was made clear. While the collective was lecturing students on the evils of defacing property, some young punk came along and tagged the canvases that were waiting outside to be worked on.
"This is what I'm talking about," Dragan, one of the producers of the program, says as he tries to paint over the stylized signature scrawled on one of the canvases.
The event, sponsored by the Toronto-Dominion Bank in partnership with the Toronto Downtown Jazz Festival, began with a talk on the ethics of graffiti. Kids were instructed on the basic techniques and asked not to use aerosol skills for criminal purposes. Then the group began painting on large outdoor canvases while local DJs spun records to set the creative mood. Two students will be chosen from each workshop to join the collective at a live graffiti exhibit to be held in Nathan Phillips Square during the jazz festival this summer.
Despite their squeaky-clean message, the Groove and Graffiti organizers concede the roots of their art form lie in vandalism and admit to some youthful indiscretions of their own. "Tagging? I used to do it," Mediah says. "But I don't defend it."
The street, after all, is the traditional canvas for aerosol art. The form, which first appeared in Philadelphia and New York in the early 1970s, has long been associated with gangs and underground urban youth culture. While the Groove and Graffiti organizers are now painting privately commissioned murals and designing shoe boxes for Nike, most got their chops in back alleys.
"I used to go to this high school," collective member Dylan Taylor says. "Back then, we did aerosol, but the difference was we had no place to do it and we had to teach ourselves. The idea here is to introduce it to kids in the same way you'd do with watercolour or charcoal."
And there's a practical element. Learning graffiti techniques is a marketable skill. Young graphic designers are paid handsomely to recreate a streetwise look for corporate clients. The same can't be said of your average watercolourist.
Dragan explains that their main aim is aesthetic. "We created the workshops to teach kids some technique. There's a big difference between spray painters and true aerosol artists." But, he adds, "it doesn't matter if you're Leonardo da Vinci -- you shouldn't deface public property."