Graffiti artists are the bad boys of the art world.

When they get ''the itch'' to paint, the city becomes their canvas.

In blazing colors they spray paint what they've got to say on the walls of empty warehouses, on the sides of beat-up buses at the depot, inside abandoned crack houses, underneath overpasses and on highway signs, this last for the most part when they're young, brazen and angry enough. Highway bombing, they call it, and it has cost some their lives.

Unlike most mainstream artists, they don't care if the public ever sees their artwork. It's not for sale, and they know that it's likely to be painted over by rival graffiti ''crews,'' by property owners or by the authorities as soon as the paintings are discovered.

They create to express themselves -- to ''tag'' their colorful murals with the streetwise nicknames they've adopted. Sometimes those names are the sole content of the work: QUAKE, CROME, CROOK, ABSTRK, ATOMIK.

''The spirit of graffiti is leaving your name behind in one of the most crude ways possible,'' says QUAKE, a Miamian in his late 20s. ``You are out there, and people will be forced to know you. . . . It works. . . . People know us, and it feeds us. We want to paint even more. Anyone else paints, and we want to paint more than them -- twice as much as them; twice as good.''

The graffiti artists exist in an underground that's tough to access. They rarely give interviews. They go by nicknames only. They decline to be photographed.

To find their work, one must leave prejudice and fear behind and follow the train tracks to the grittier sides of Hialeah, Overtown, Wynwood, North Miami. That's what New York photographers James and Karla Murray did for 10 years to chronicle a span of Miami art history from the mid-1990s to today and a subculture many seldom see.

''A strong graffiti art scene has existed in Miami for over a quarter century, but it had hardly been documented,'' the photographers write in their new book Miami Graffiti (Prestel, $25).

Known for their images of New York graffiti showcased in previous books Broken Windows and Burning New York, the Murrays earned the trust of the Miami artists by showing up in the most seedy parts of town, equipment in hand, ready to listen and document without judgment.

They visited housing projects, walked crack alleys, and climbed onto roof tops and loading docks. They photographed graffiti everywhere -- on a palm tree trunk, at neglected public spaces such as Key Biscayne's Marine Stadium and the cavernous abandoned buildings next to the train tracks in Hialeah that the artists call ``the penit.''

These buildings, the Murrays say, have become ``de facto museums of graffiti art and incubators of style.''

''In New York, the color palette is darker, but here there are these bright, tropical candy colors,'' says Karla Murray, who has family in Miami and, with her husband, visits often. ``When I saw the great quality of the works, we knew we wanted to document them in a serious way.''

Says QUAKE: ``They earned our respect. They were not afraid to get their hands dirty. It took them months to find me, and they caught me painting.''

In Miami Graffiti the Murrays feature various South Florida crews.

But the book's cover image with the King Orange character and many of the most striking murals featured inside are by MSGCARTEL to which QUAKE, CROME, CROOK, ABSTRK and ATOMIK belong. The crew is some 50 members strong and stretches as far south as Homestead and north to Palm Beach and has participants in graffiti centers like Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta, according to CROOK, who now paints less and has assumed the role of organizer.

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