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Opinion by Howard Salmon: Want to learn to draw? Start scribbling! Howard Salmon, SPECIAL TO THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR Publication Date: May 29, 2006 Page: E6 Section: ACCENT Edition: FINAL

Let yourself go, and you'll see patterns emerge
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This column, a new addition to the BYOB page, will be a monthly workshop on how to make and appreciate art. A lot of art and art-making can be reduced to a series of creative games. And who doesn't like games? So let's have some fun as we explore how to make captivating pictures, from simple to complex.
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If you'd like to become a better artist, start doodling. Doodles and scribbles, however quick and easy to make, can be works of art in themselves. They don't have to look like anything, either. You'll be surprised at what your mind can find in a series of random squiggles and shapes.

One reason why we enjoy doodling and scribbling so much is because it takes us back to our childhood, when we scribbled on Mom's walls. My fondest memories of art go back to those early days of discovery with a box of crayons. But why should those days ever end? I say doodle for as long as you can hold a crayon! It keeps your creativity flowing and keeps your courage up. Yes, creating art can be intimidating. Often we find ourselves acting as our own worst critics, sabotaging ourselves with talk of "that doesn't look like art!" You can imagine what your inner critic will say about scribbling. But you must be brave! Take out a sheet of paper right now, grab a pen (or crayon), and make a swirling, continuous line that crosses over itself in several places. Make a few more. Are you repeating yourself, or are these drawings evolving in any way? You'll find that as you scribble and doodle, you may find a pattern or design that you like to repeat over and over again. This often happens to me when I make scribble drawings. I'll get into a groove, drawing a certain way, with a certain tempo, a certain rhythm . . . and then suddenly it will change, and I'll be drawing a different pattern.

Recently I spent a solid hour filling page after page with doodles and scribbles. I was drawing so fast, and with such intensity and concentration, that I was knocking off a large sketch every 60 seconds. By the end of an hour, my doodling vocabulary had changed. I had a new set of patterns and textures to work with.

If you make a series of drawings using similar lines and shapes, you'll find that they'll change in amusing and wonderful ways. Just as a pebble can cause ripples in a pond, a slight change in your scribbling and doodling can produce new shapes and patterns as you work from the start of the pad to the end.

You may wonder if scribbling and doodling really count as "art."

Of course they do. We're dealing with the most fundamental element of visual art, which is a mark on a surface. But how do you know if it's any good? You need only concern yourself with one criterion: Is it interesting? If it keeps your attention, if you get a kick out of it, then it's doing its job as art.

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Doodling and scribbling are also known as "automatic writing" (actually automatic drawing), which means drawing that is done in a semiconscious state, a state of mind where you don't censor yourself. Censorship is the bane of art, and self-censorship is the worst, because creating art should be a liberating experience. The best way to create artwork in an automatic state of mind is to become an observer of your hand drawing, rather then being a critic. As you make circles and lines, look at your hand and the marks it makes with a sense of fascination and wonder. What is this thing called my hand? How is it possible that it's holding a crayon and making lines? As you draw, look at the unfolding result as if you're witnessing something for the first time. That will put you in the correct frame of mind to create work without being bothered by your inner critic. /////

SURREALISM

Surrealism is a movement in art in which artists relied heavily on random processes, such as automatic drawing, to jumpstart their creativity.

They were inspired by the ideas of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, specifically his theory that we have a subconscious mind where our real selves reside, uncensored by the conscious mind. Freud accessed the unconscious simply by getting the patient to talk about himself or herself. Artists access their subconscious minds by adding an element of randomness to their work, and using that randomness as a starting point for ideas. If you are interested in playing some surrealist games, here are two book recommendations: "A Book of Surrealist Games" by Alastair Brotchie, and any of the "Mad Libs" series of humor books.

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* Howard Salmon, MFA, is a local artist and educator. Contact him at hsalmon@howardsalmon.com.

Play with water so you'll learn to control it
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Doodling and scribbling are great ways to get ideas for art. This is because by getting into a daydreamy state, we create interesting lines and shapes. However, you can get even more random and interesting if you choose to add water to your work. If you use ink or paint in your drawings, dropping some water through it will create exciting patterns and subtle, moody effects. Watercolor is the most obvious place to look for the effects of water in paint. You'll find that the less you do - and the more you let the water do what it wants - the better your painting will look.

Here's a painting of the Chicago skyline that I did several years ago. Notice the mottled effect in the sky and the soft, diffuse edges of the buildings, which reminds me of how I feel on an overcast day. In this painting, water did most of the work for me. When water touches paint, it goes nuts and creates hairy tendrils, subtle shades and blotches. That's the type of stuff you want to encourage because it looks so interesting.

In fact, the only artistic part that comes in is knowing how to control the water so you don't make a complete mess. This is usually done with a piece of tissue or paper towel. If water is pooling too much, soak up some of it with a paper towel. Just a touch of the paper towel into the water will be enough to absorb some water. The same goes if your painting starts to drip: Cut it off at the pass with a piece of paper towel. Let the water do its thing - just don't let it get too out of control. Even the way you apply the water to the paper can affect the ink or paint it comes in contact with. If you dip your finger in water and then smear it on a piece of paper, an ink line will react very differently than if you spritz the water on from a squirt bottle.

You can also experiment with the type of pen you use. I almost always avoid using store-bought pens because the lines are too uniform, and, for my tastes, they look too dull. I prefer to make my own pens, either by using a small piece of paper folded over a few times or, better yet, by using a twig or a stick from outside: I prefer the look of an organic, unpredictable line. If you draw an ink line (with a bottle of india ink and a stick) through a wet spot on your paper, the water will activate the ink and cause it to make incredible patterns and a wide range of grays. (In the example below, the line with no water on the page is at left; middle, water wiped with finger; right, spritzed water from spray bottle).

As you can see, there is an entire vocabulary of marks and watercolor techniques just waiting to be discovered, and all that's required is your curiosity. Just as with doodling; you give up a little bit of control, and you get a lot in return. Wet-on-wet or wet-on-dry?

There are two basic ways of painting in watercolor: the wet-on-wet method and the wet-on-dry method.

With the wet-on-wet method, you put wet paint onto a wet surface to create soft, diffuse edges. In the wet-on-dry method, you paint wet paint on a dry surface to create hard-edged shapes.

I usually make my watercolor paintings in two passes. I'll lay in my initial colors using the wet-on-wet method. When it's dry, I'll go back into it, with other colors, to make hard-edged shapes.

I wouldn't recommend making a watercolor painting that's got more than two layers of paint on it, or else you'll have a muddy-looking mess on your hands. Less paint gives it a light, airy feeling.

Bruce McGrew's technique

A lot of local watercolor artists are inspired by the work of the late Bruce McGrew. If you've studied McGrew's work, you'll see that he had a technique of painting interlocking shapes, like puzzle pieces. That is, he'd paint, say, the branches of a tree, and while they were still wet, he'd paint the spaces between the branches, but he had to be careful not to let the positive and negative shapes touch, or else they'd blur together. If you're careful, you can have crisp edges everywhere without letting your painting dry, it just requires that you be careful not to let one puddle of paint touch another. The candy connection

Did you know that watercolor paints and candy have something in common? The same glue (or binder) holds them together. Gum arabic, the sap that comes from the acacia tree, is used by candy makers and watercolor-paint manufacturers to give their products some body, some firmness.

The advantage of Gum arabic is that it's water soluble, which explains why watercolor paints loosen up, and why candies melt in your mouth, when they come into contact with water (or drool).

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New question:

* If you were king or queen of the world, what would be your first decree? Send your answer to: BYOB, Arizona Daily Star, P.O. Box 26807, Tucson, AZ 85726, e-mail to byob@azstarnet.com with BYOBrain in the subject line, or fax to 573-4140.

Please include your full name, age and school.

The deadline is 5 p.m. Thursday.

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* Howard Salmon, MFA, is a local artist and educator. Contact him at hsalmon@howardsalmon.com.

B.Y.O. BRAIN
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Good 'art athletes' need to develop proper techniques

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Up to this point, with these columns on art, I've emphasized how accidents and doodling can be a wellspring of good ideas. But I don't want to give you the impression that art is easy. It can actually be quite technical. In fact, one measure of your skill as an artist is your knowledge and ability of how to create certain effects with paint. My opinion is that painting would make a great spectator sport, and I don't just mean watching "how to" shows on television. I view painting as being just as rigorous as, say, golf or chess, and both of those appear on the sports channel. So what do you say about having an Art Olympics? I think it would be great to have artists from around the world competing for a gold medal. Of course, the emphasis would have to be on craft and skill, which is easily measured (rather than the quality of the idea), but that would be OK.

I would rather regard myself as an art athlete, perfecting my craft and style in my studio in preparation for the big game. It would be great; winning a gold medal, getting a big check, and seeing my picture on a box of Wheaties. So as an entrŽe to the art of painting, I've worked up a comic strip called The Art Olympics, which quickly goes over some of the steps in how an artist makes a painting.

Between 1908 and 1948, there were actually art exhibits included as part of the Olympics. They weren't sporting events, they were art exhibits; the work had to have a sports theme. The founder of the modern Olympics (a Frenchman) felt that the Greek ideal of strong mind/ strong body was best exemplified by including art exhibits alongside the sporting events.

In 1932, the American cartoonist Percy Crosby, creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip Skippy, won the Olympic Silver Medal . . . for drawing and watercolor! (The name "Skippy" was later appropriated by the peanut butter company.) Let's talk about brushes

There are really only about three types of brushes that matter in painting: the flat, the round, and the filbert. The flat is shaped like a chisel or a screwdriver; the round is shaped like a dowel with a rounded top; and the filbert is a combination of the two (that is, a flat brush with a rounded top). The best way to learn how to use these brushes is to play around with them. When you develop some skill, you should be able to get almost any brush to do what you want it to. If the brush is thick, use it to lay in broad areas of color. If the brush is thin, use it as a drawing instrument. When I paint I make all kinds of marks: short choppy strokes, long drawn-out strokes, swirling scribble-like strokes. To get an interesting, organic line, I'll even roll the brush between my fingers, back and forth, as I drag it across a painting. This will create an uneven and spontaneous-looking line that's good for painting flower stems or wild hairs.

To build up your skill, you can create a series of brushstroke exercises for yourself, just as if you were in a gym working out. You could do, say, 10 reps of short choppy strokes made in the exact same way. Do them right alongside each other in a sketchbook, so you can compare them. Then do something else, like making a series of super thin and super thick lines, all with the same brush. It would be just like musical scales on a piano, but you'd be creating your own set of exercises to practice. Rembrandt popularized a way of painting that has become the classic way of painting that's persisted to this day. It involves making an "underpainting," or a rough sketch made of paint, typically a reddish brown wash. Using the underpainting as a guide, he built up thicker and thicker paint, glopping on the highlights.

And now, bristles

There are two basic types of bristles: hard and soft. Hard bristles, typically made of hog's hair, are used for oils and acrylics. They can take a lot of punishment. Soft-haired brushes are usually made of sable hair. They are used with ink or watercolor. Did you know that the only difference between oil, acrylic and watercolor paint is the binder (or medium) that holds them together? The pigments are all the same and come in a powdered form.

Colored powdered pigments are mixed with oil (linseed oil is the most popular) to make oil paint, acrylic polymer to make acrylic paint, and gum Arabic to make watercolor paint.

* Howard Salmon, MFA, is a local artist and educator. E-mail him at hsalmon@howardsalmon.com.

B.Y.O. BRAIN
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Have fun mixing hues to develop brush skills and paint techniques

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Today I'd like to talk about color. It can be a complicated subject, but it doesn't need to be. First of all, there are only three colors that you need to concern yourself with in painting: cyan (which is a turquoise-like blue), magenta, and yellow. These three colors you can get only from the tube; you can't mix other colors to create these. These colors are fundamental, like axioms in geometry. Add to that black and white, which technically aren't colors, they're neutrals, and you're ready to go. Five tubes of paint (cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white) can keep you busy mixing color for a lifetime.

The best way to learn about color is to play with it. Mix your paints together to see how many different colors you can make. To simplify things, and to organize your discoveries, I'd suggest mixing with the help of a matrix or a grid.

Draw on a piece of paper a 5-by-5 matrix. Along the horizontal and vertical axes, paint in a sample of each color (out of the tube) in a separate box on the grid. You'll have black, cyan, magenta, yellow and white going along the top and down the side. Then calculate color mixtures just as if this were a multiplication table. Not only is this an efficient way to explore your color combination possibilities, but the resulting chart looks really cool. It's a great piece of artwork unto itself.

This exercise is also a good way to develop some skill with the brush. For every color that you mix up, paint a box on the grid so that it's completely filled. Make sure that you don't touch any of the lines.

LET'S PAINT A PICTURE

When you're starting out painting, it's not important to learn the technical stuff about color and composition. It's more important that you have some memorable experiences pushing paint around. Only when you're ready to make an improvement does technique become important. Make your own discoveries and come to your own conclusions.

The study of color (that is, color theory) really comes in handy only when there's something wrong with your picture and you really can't place it. If that's the case, then it's useful to know some strategies that other artists have used to correct the bad color in their pictures. Then you simply make some adjustments, going back to what has worked for others in the past.

One strategy is to copy the colors in a painting or picture that you like. This will also get you started on mixing colors, because you don't get all of the colors you want straight out of the tube. You have to mix colors together until you get the target color right.

Another strategy is to learn the rules of color theory, which basically is a set of formulas for mixing paint and for choosing harmonious color clusters.

Believe it or not, the laws of color theory were actually derived from trigonometry, with the color wheel being a unit circle. It's a fascinating story, and if you'd like to read up on it check out Isaac Newton's book "Opticks" (Prometheus, $15), which is still in print after 300 years.

In addition to the basic paint set I recommended, I'd also advise getting a bottle of acrylic medium, so you can make colored glazes. If you're using oil paint, just use linseed oil.

I've made many paintings using what I call my "comic book" formula, where I'd only use the process printing primaries. I'd start by making an underpainting just using brown and white. I'd then paint over the whole thing using a yellow transparent glaze. Then I'd selectively paint in areas with a magenta glaze, knowing that magenta and yellow make orange. I'd then make an additional pass with a cyan glaze, just hitting the areas that I wanted to be dark, usually shadows. If I wanted to bring out areas of light or highlight, I'd mix up thicker paint, and paint it in those places.

If you want to cut to the chase, and make your paintings have a sense of mood and drama, focus on the shadows. This goes for watercolors as well as for acrylics and oils. Shadows aren't just about adding black to color. There are many gradations of color in shadows; they're just harder to see than the colors in light.

In fact, what goes on in the shadows is often far more interesting than what goes on in the light. This is where the "sublime" resides in art: in the dark places. There is a famous book about this subject called "A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (Penguin Classics, $14.95), which lists all of the qualities that make artwork sublime (as well as beautiful); beauty is all about light, whereas the sublime is all about darkness. It was written by Edmund Burke (from England), back in 1757, when he was only 19 years old!

* Howard Salmon, MFA, is a local artist and educator. You can contact him at hsalmon@howardsalmon.com

Whenever I'm feeling sad or depressed, one thing that can instantly make me feel better is music. It's incredible how quickly music can change your mood. If we could figure out how music works on people's moods and translate it into colors, shapes and designs, we could become more effective artists. As you'll find out, artists have made great strides toward making art more like music.

A good way to start your own exploration of the link between music and art is to put on some of your favorite music and paint along to it. Just make sure that your brush strokes are a reaction to the music.

You can make a game out of this by forming your own "art band" on a canvas or piece of paper. Each instrument will be represented by a different color and pattern. For guitar, you might want to play air guitar on a piece of paper while holding a brush or crayon. The squiggly line that results will be the "sound" of the guitar.

Drums (a different color) would be dots and dashes (something that resembles drum beats), and so on. Have fun creating visual translations for sound. You might find yourself singing along as you paint - that's a good thing! You're building connections in your brain that link art and music. And why stop with one song? Go on and paint an entire album of art songs.

Many artists have thought about the problem of making art more like music. You can look no further than Tucson to find this. The late Ted DeGrazia, local Southwest expressionist, wrote his master's thesis at the University of Arizona on the subject. His thesis was titled "Art and its relation to music in music education." You can still find several copies at the UA library. It's fascinating to browse through DeGrazia's thesis. He was interested in how to translate pictures and designs into specific feelings. My favorite part of his thesis is a psychology test he created, with several columns of small icons, each with a different pattern or squiggle of his own design. He'd give this test to a class of students in order to get their emotional feedback. He was interested in discovering how designs work on our moods.

The thesis ends with his own graphic translation of Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite." He paints a panoramic image of what looks like a series of mountains and fountains. I can imagine DeGrazia furiously painting away, with the "Firebird Suite" blaring in the background, all in the name of research.

In 1905, an American artist named Albert Munsell published a book called "A Color Notation" (Kessinger Publishing, $17.95), which was his answer to the musical notation of musicians.

He invented a way of describing color with a precise formula, so that artists could mix up color with scientific precision; he'd created the artistic answer to sheet music.

He advocated that all color names be replaced with a technical name that identifies the three components of color: hue, value and chroma.

Hue is the basic color family, value is the lightness or darkness when held up to a numbered gray scale, and chroma is the amount of saturation when held up to a similar numbered scale.

One letter and two numbers can accurately describe any color you can think of, just as if a single dot placed on a particular line of a musical staff identifies a middle C. Thus, the color yellow becomes translated to, say, Y/9/8. To recreate this color, all you need to do is refer to a yellow color grid, which identifies all of the possible variations of yellow when you adjust the mixture of yellow, black and white.

Attention artists: Would you like to share your art-making techniques with our readers? If so, please send in your information. All ages welcome.

Attention readers: Keep sending in your questions.

* Howard Salmon, MFA, is a local artist and educator. You can contact him at hsalmon@howardsalmon.com.

'Arcade' at UA similar to paper cut with scissors

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I've always loved pop-up books.

It's not the 3-D quality, which I really enjoy, but the craft. The way people can make something really spectacular out of something that's very simple. In the case of pop-up books, it's just a few cuts in some paper, and some glue, and wow - what a difference that can make.

Maybe that's why I'm so drawn to Athena Tacha's "Curving Arcades" sculpture on the University of Arizona Mall. In October, it will be the 25th anniversary of the sculpture's installation.

I enjoy looking at it whenever I'm headed down Campbell Avenue, by Third Street. It reminds me of a few sheets of cut paper, pulled apart and fastened with glue. The accordionlike legs of the sculpture also remind me of party decorations. Who would have thought that there was a way to make paper stretch like a rubber band? It sounds like alchemy. How do you give paper the properties of rubber? By making some alternating cuts in it. As a first project, you can make your own replica of "Curving Arcades" simply with some paper and scissors.

I contacted Tacha and asked her how she made "Curving Arcades." Here's what she told me, in her own words: "Each arcade is made of four square sheets of Cor-Ten steel, 3/4-inch thick, each 16-by-16 feet. Cuts are made into each sheet at equal intervals (18 inches), alternating from above and below. Three curved concrete foundations are poured, with steel supports embedded into them at equal intervals (approximately 5 feet). Then a crane brings every steel plate and holds it above each foundation while a crew below attaches with bolts the 'legs' into consecutive supports. Opening up the legs and stretching them apart creates the curved arches.

"Theoretically, if the legs are detached, the arcades will spring back into a flat position. The steel is indeed under tension, because it hums in the wind, like a harp.

"The plates were then sandblasted, primed and painted six different metallic enamels -three reds and three blues (for the UA's colors) from opposite sides, each wrapping around the edges of the steel on one side. "It's the fifth in a series, called 'Tension Arches.' Three others are located in Ohio, and one in Florida, but the one in Tucson is the largest."

If that's the case, then you could regard "Curving Arcades" not just as a work of public art, but as a public musical instrument. I wonder if someone tapping on it at just the right places could compose a song on it? Something along the lines of the steel drum, which is actually an instrument made out of an oil drum. And with six similar sculptures spread across the country, I could see a series of tension-arches concerts being performed, but only at those six places.

I visited the sculpture to figure out how to play it, like a musical instrument. There was no wind, so I didn't hear a harp. And when I put my ear up to it and tapped it with my fingernail, I heard a metallic "clank" and then a sustained low rumbling sound, kind of like when a jet goes overhead.

I tested the legs at various points by tapping on them, and they all made the same sound. As a musical instrument that you tap, it made only one note (which sounded like a middle-C). You could definitely use this technique to tune your guitar to it: Tune your "C" string to the sound of the sculpture, and then extrapolate the remaining notes. As far as being a wind instrument, I'll just have to pay another visit on a windy day.

Cor-Ten steel

* It was patented in 1973 as "Corrosion-resistant carbon steel," and it's made of an alloy of 11 metals. It was created by Brazilian inventors with the automobile industry in mind, to prevent car bodies from rusting.

* Howard Salmon, MFA, is a local artist and educator. Contact him at hsalmon@howardsalmon.com.

B.Y.O. BRAIN

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Local artist has own style for texturing

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Local artist Jim Waid makes big acrylic paintings. After he paints the picture, he scrapes off certain areas of the paint with various kitchen utensils and hardware-store items. Why? Because he likes the effects he can make with them.

This is one of Waid's paintings, titled "Night Shimmy." Can you guess what some of the marks in the painting were made with? Hint: One is a tool used to make scrambled eggs and other breakfast foods; two were made by an object used to put something red on your hot dog; and the other marks were made with a tool that is used to make a tiled floor and resembles something you could use to comb your hair.

Find the letters A, B, C and D in the picture, and guess what items Jim used to make those textures.

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Answers A. These star shapes were made by squeezing paint out of a ketchup bottle.
B. These white lines were made with a tool called a tile setters comb tool, which has edges like a hair comb.
C. This spider web was created with the ketchup bottle again.
D. On this area, Jim used a rubber kitchen spatula like one you would use to flip pancakes. First he created a colorful drawing and covered it with black paint. Then he used the spatula to scrape off areas of the black paint to reveal the drawing underneath. Later, Jim put brown paint on the spatula and lightly shook it over the painting, leaving brown dots and texture.