Elementary Art & Music

A horse on a cave wall

In the south of France there is a cave called Lascaux. About seventeen thousand years ago, someone crawled into the dark with a burning lamp and drew horses, deer and huge bulls on the rock.

They had no pencils. They used lumps of charcoal from the fire for black, and yellow and red earth ground into powder for colour. Some of the animals are bigger than a car.

Four boys found the cave in 1940 while they were out with a dog. Nobody had seen those horses for a very, very long time. And here is the thing to notice: the person who drew them was doing exactly what you do when you draw a horse on paper.

Key idea: People have been making art for longer than they have been writing. It is one of the oldest things humans do.

The four things an artist does

An artist is a person who makes things for other people to look at, or listen to, or walk around. Artists work in a pattern with four steps.

1. Look. Really look at something, for longer than feels normal.
2. Choose. Decide what to put in and what to leave out.
3. Make marks. Draw, paint, cut, glue, bend, build.
4. Share. Show it to somebody.

You will do all four in this course. The first one is the one most people skip.

Looking is the hard part

Put a spoon on the table in front of you. Look at it for thirty whole seconds. Do not draw yet. Just look.

Here is what you will start to notice if you really do it. The bowl of the spoon is not a circle, it is a squashed oval. There is a bright white spot where the light bounces off. The handle is thinner in the middle than at the end. Your face may be in it, upside down.

None of that is what you picture when somebody says the word spoon. Your head keeps a simple sign for a spoon, and your eyes see something much stranger.

The point: Artists draw what their eyes report, not the sign their head keeps.

Your tools

You do not need to buy anything for this course. Here is the whole list.

• A pencil. Any pencil.
• Paper. The back of used paper is fine.
• An eraser, if you have one.
• Crayons, coloured pencils or felt pens, if you have them.
• Scissors and glue for later lessons.
• A shoebox or cereal box, saved for the sculpture lesson.

One more thing helps more than anything you could buy: a sketchbook. That just means a stack of paper stapled together, or an old notebook, kept in one place so your drawings do not get lost.

Marks: the alphabet of drawing

Every drawing in the world is made of marks. A mark is any trace your pencil leaves.

Try these seven, right now, in a row across one page.

1. A long straight line.
2. A wobbly line, like a worm.
3. A zigzag, like the top of a mountain.
4. A spiral, starting in the middle and going round.
5. Twenty small dots.
6. A patch of scribble, pressing hard so it goes dark.
7. The same scribble again, pressing so lightly you can barely see it.

Look at numbers 6 and 7. Same pencil, same hand, totally different feeling. One looks like a storm cloud. One looks like fog.

Remember: How hard you press changes the mark as much as what shape you draw.

Choosing what to leave out

Around 1831, a Japanese artist named Hokusai made a print of a wave. It is called Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and most people call it The Great Wave. You can see one of the copies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In the picture, the wave is enormous, curling over with white claws of foam. There are three boats full of people underneath it. And far away, small, in the middle of the picture, is Mount Fuji, a whole mountain, made tiny.

Hokusai could have drawn the mountain big. It is a big mountain. He chose not to. He put the wave in front so the wave would win.

That is choosing. Every artist does it, every time. What goes in front? What gets left out? What gets made bigger than it really is?

Why this matters: A picture is not a copy of the world. It is a set of choices about the world.

Art that moves, and art you walk around

Not all art hangs flat on a wall.

An American artist called Alexander Calder made hanging sculptures out of wire and cut metal shapes. They are balanced so carefully that a puff of air makes them turn. They are called mobiles, and Tate in London has several. Nobody had really made art that moved on its own before he did.

Other art you walk all the way around, like a statue in a park. Some art is a building. Some art is a song, which you cannot see at all. In the second half of this course, all the art is made of sound.

What being good at art actually means

Lots of children decide by the age of eight that they are bad at art. Almost always they mean one thing: my drawings do not look like photographs.

That is not what art is for. A photograph of Mount Fuji already existed in Hokusai's time, more or less, and nobody queues to look at it.

Being good at art means three things, and every one of them gets better with practice.

• You look harder than you used to.
• Your hand does more of what you ask it to do.
• You make braver choices about what to put in.

Hokusai was about seventy when he made the Great Wave. In a note he wrote for one of his books, he said that he still had plenty to learn, and that he hoped his drawing would keep getting better as he got older. If he thought that, you are allowed to be at the start.

Bottom line: Nobody is born able to draw. It is a thing you get better at, like riding a bike.

Try it: one object, three ways

Pick one object from the kitchen. A fork, a mug, an apple.

1. Draw it in ten seconds. Count out loud.
2. Draw it again in one minute.
3. Draw it a third time, but look at the object the whole time and only glance at your paper.

Now compare. Most people find the ten second drawing is the neatest and the least like the real thing, because it is the sign in your head. The third one is usually the messiest and the most like the object, because it came from your eyes.

In short: Slow looking makes better drawings than a steady hand does.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: art means drawing. Drawing is one kind. Cutting paper, printing, building with boxes, singing and playing a drum are all art too, and this course does all of them.
• Mistake: a good drawing looks exactly like a photo. The Lascaux horses look nothing like a photo and people have travelled across the world to see them.
• Mistake: you have to get it right first time. Artists fill sketchbooks with drawings nobody ever sees. That is the job, not a failure at the job.
• Mistake: an eraser means you did it wrong. Erasing is part of drawing. So is drawing straight over a line you do not like and leaving both.

What you now know

• People have made art for at least seventeen thousand years, since the Lascaux cave paintings.
• Artists look, choose, make marks, and share.
• Looking is the step most people skip, and the one that helps most.
• A mark changes when you press harder or softer, not only when you change its shape.
• Hokusai made a mountain small so a wave could look huge. That is choosing.
• Being good at art is something you practise, not something you are born with.

Sources

1. Ministere de la Culture. (n.d.). Lascaux cave. Archeologie. archeologie.culture.gouv.fr
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Lascaux. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Katsushika Hokusai. (ca. 1830-32). Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
4. Tate. (n.d.). Alexander Calder 1898-1976. Tate. tate.org.uk
5. Tate Kids. (n.d.). Tate Kids home. Tate. tate.org.uk

Draw round your hand

Put your left hand flat on a piece of paper. Take a pencil in your right hand and draw all the way round it, keeping the pencil touching the paper the whole time, until you get back to where you started. If you are left handed, swap hands.

That took about twenty seconds, and it made both of the things this lesson is about.

You made a line: a mark that travels. And because the line came back to where it started, it closed up and made a shape: the flat area inside.

Key idea: A line that returns to its own beginning makes a shape. That is the whole relationship between the two words.

What a line can do

A line is a mark that is much longer than it is wide. Every line has two things you can change.

• Its path. Straight, curved, looping, jagged.
• Its weight. Thick and dark, or thin and pale.

Draw one long line across a page, starting by pressing hard and slowly letting go until the pencil is barely touching. That single line goes from heavy to light. Artists use that all the time: heavy at the bottom of an object where the shadow is, light at the top where the light hits.

The point: A line is not just a shape. It also has a weight, and the weight carries meaning.

Six kinds of line

Draw each of these across one page, one under the other, and say the feeling word out loud as you draw.

Kind of line	How to draw it	What it feels like
Straight	Move in one direction, no wobble	Calm, still, built by people
Curved	Bend it slowly, like a smile	Gentle, alive, growing
Zigzag	Sharp corners, up down up down	Excited, spiky, dangerous
Spiral	Start in the middle, circle outwards	Dizzy, spinning, deep
Broken	Short dashes with gaps	Shy, unsure, far away
Thick	Press hard or go over it twice	Heavy, close, important

Now cover the words and look only at your six lines. The zigzag really does look more excited than the curve. Nobody had to tell you that. Lines carry feeling before they carry anything else.

Lines doing a job in a real painting

Vincent van Gogh painted Wheat Field with Cypresses in 1889. It hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Get someone to find a picture of it, or just picture this. The wheat in the field is painted in short lines all leaning the same way, so the whole field looks like it is being pushed by wind. The clouds are painted in long curling lines that roll over each other. The dark cypress tree on the right is painted in lines that twist upwards like a flame.

Van Gogh could have painted a smooth green tree. He did not. He built the whole picture out of visible lines, and that is why a still painting feels like a windy day.

Why this matters: The kind of line an artist chooses changes how the whole picture feels, even before you notice what it shows.

Two families of shape

Shapes come in two families, and you can sort almost anything into one of them.

Geometric shapes have names and rules. Circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval, diamond. Their edges are neat. People make most of them: windows, books, wheels, road signs.

Organic shapes have no name and no rules. A puddle, a leaf, a cloud, a splat of jam, the outline of your hand. Their edges wander. Nature makes most of them.

Look at the drawing of your hand from the start of the lesson. That is an organic shape. Now look at the paper it is drawn on. That is a rectangle, a geometric shape. Both are on your table right now.

Remember: Geometric shapes have names and neat edges. Organic shapes are wandering and one of a kind.

Finding the big shapes first

Here is a trick that makes hard objects easy. Before you draw the details, ask: what large simple shapes is this made of?

• A house: a square with a triangle on top.
• An ice cream cone: a triangle pointing down with a circle balanced on it.
• A mug: a rectangle with a bent handle and an oval at the top.
• A tree: a tall thin rectangle with a big cloud shape above it.

Draw those big shapes lightly first, then go round them again more carefully, looking at the real object and fixing anything that is wrong.

There is a warning attached to this trick. If you stop at the big shapes, you have drawn the sign in your head, not the thing in front of you. Real mugs are not rectangles. The big shapes are a starting place to correct, not an answer.

Worth holding on to: Start with big simple shapes, then fix them by looking. Never skip the fixing.

Contour: drawing only the edge

A contour line is a line that follows the edge of a thing, the way the line round your hand did.

Try this with a shoe. Put it on the table sideways. Start your pencil at the tip of the toe and travel slowly all the way round the outside: up over the toe, along the top, down the back of the heel, along the sole, back to the start.

Go slowly. Your pencil should be moving at the same speed your eye moves along the edge of the shoe. If your pencil finishes first, you were guessing.

Now try it once more without looking at your paper at all. Keep your eyes locked on the shoe. The drawing will come out lumpy and wrong and probably will not join up, and it will still catch things about that shoe your neat drawing missed.

The shape of the gap

Hold a mug by the handle and look through the handle hole.

That hole is a shape too. It has a curved outside and a straight inside and it is a bit like a fat comma. Artists call the shapes made by the empty gaps negative space.

Here is why this is useful. You have a strong idea in your head about what a mug handle looks like, so you draw the sign. You have no idea at all what the hole looks like, so you have to actually look at it. Drawing the hole is easier than drawing the handle, and when the hole is right, the handle is right too.

In short: Drawing the empty gap is a way of tricking yourself into looking properly.

Try it: shape hunt

Look around the room and find one of each. Write down what you found, then check against the answers.

1. A circle.
2. A rectangle taller than it is wide.
3. An organic shape.
4. A shape made of a gap rather than a solid thing.

Here are answers that work in most rooms. A circle: a clock face, a plate, a doorknob. A tall rectangle: a door, a book standing up, a window. An organic shape: a houseplant leaf, a crumpled sock, a splash on the window. A gap shape: the space between two chair legs, the hole in a scissor handle, the gap under a shut door.

The core of it: Once you start sorting the room into lines, shapes and gaps, you are looking like an artist even when you are not drawing.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: a line has to be straight. A spiral, a squiggle and the outline of a puddle are all lines. Straight is one option out of many.
• Mistake: shapes are only circles, squares and triangles. Those are the geometric ones. Most shapes in the world are organic and have no name at all.
• Mistake: real objects are made of the simple shapes. A mug is not a rectangle. The big shapes are scaffolding you put up first and then correct by looking.
• Mistake: pressing the same all the way through is neater. A line that changes weight tells the viewer where the light and the shadow are. Even pressure throws that away.

Pulling it together

• A line is a travelling mark. It has a path and a weight, and both change how it feels.
• When a line closes back on itself, it makes a shape.
• Geometric shapes have names and neat edges. Organic shapes wander.
• Van Gogh built a whole windy field out of short leaning lines.
• Start a drawing with big simple shapes, then correct them by looking hard.
• Drawing the gaps, the negative space, forces you to look instead of remembering.

Sources

1. Vincent van Gogh. (1889). Wheat Field with Cypresses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Drawing. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Contour drawing. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Tate Kids. (n.d.). Painting and drawing. Tate. tate.org.uk

A painting that is almost all yellow

In the National Gallery in London there is a painting by Vincent van Gogh of sunflowers in a jug. He made it in 1888.

Count the yellows. The petals are yellow. The jug is yellow. The table is yellow. The wall behind is yellow. He even signed his name in blue on the yellow jug, which is the one place your eye goes first.

A painting made of one colour should be boring. This one is not, and by the end of this lesson you will know exactly why the blue signature jumps off the yellow jug.

Key idea: Colours change depending on which colour is sitting next to them.

The three you cannot make

Get out your crayons or paints. Try to mix red. Go on, try.

You cannot. There is no pair of colours you can put together that makes red. The same is true for yellow and for blue.

These three are the primary colours. Primary means first. They are the starting colours, and every other colour in your box came from them.

Remember: Red, yellow and blue cannot be mixed from anything else. Everything else can be mixed from them.

Mixing the next three

Now mix the primaries in pairs. Here is what you get every single time.

Mix this	With this	And you get
Red	Yellow	Orange
Yellow	Blue	Green
Blue	Red	Purple

Orange, green and purple are the secondary colours. Secondary means second, because they come second, after the primaries.

If you have no paint, you can still do this. Colour a patch of yellow with a crayon, then colour blue right on top of it, pressing hard. Green appears. Layering crayons mixes colour just as mixing paint does.

How much of each changes everything

Red and yellow make orange, but which orange?

• A lot of yellow and a tiny bit of red gives a pale orange, like a peach.
• Equal amounts give a bright carrot orange.
• A lot of red and a tiny bit of yellow gives a deep orange, almost like a brick.

Here is a rule that saves a lot of ruined paint. Start with the lighter colour and add the darker one a little at a time. One drop of blue turns a big pool of yellow green. A big pool of blue needs an enormous amount of yellow to shift it at all.

The point: Dark colours are stronger than light ones, so add the dark one drop by drop.

Putting them in a circle

A colour wheel is the six colours arranged in a circle, in the order they belong.

Go round like this: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and then you are back at red. Notice the pattern. Between every two primaries sits the secondary you get by mixing them. Orange sits between red and yellow, exactly where it came from.

Draw one. Make a circle, mark six spots like the numbers on a clock at 12, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, and colour them in that order. Keep it in your sketchbook. You will use it in the next few lessons.

Opposites: the pairs that shout

Look at your wheel and find the colour directly opposite each one. There are three pairs.

• Red is opposite green.
• Yellow is opposite purple.
• Blue is opposite orange.

These pairs are called complementary colours, and they do two opposite things depending on what you do with them.

Side by side, they shout. Put a red dot on green paper and it almost buzzes. This is why holly berries look so bright against the leaves, and why van Gogh's blue signature leaps off the yellow jug. Blue and yellow are not quite opposites, but they are far enough apart to work the same way.

Mixed together, they go quiet. Stir red into green and you get a muddy brown. Stir blue into orange and you get a soft grey brown. Opposites cancel each other out.

Why this matters: Opposite colours make each other look brighter when they are next to each other, and duller when they are mixed together.

Warm and cool

Cut your colour wheel in half with an imaginary line and you get two halves that feel completely different.

Warm colours are red, orange and yellow. Fire, sun, hot sand. They seem to come towards you.

Cool colours are green, blue and purple. Water, ice, shade under a tree. They seem to sit further back.

Artists use this to make flat paper look deep. Paint a warm orange house and cool blue hills behind it and the hills fall away into the distance without you drawing anything smaller.

Try it: colour two identical squares, one orange and one blue, side by side. Stare at them. The orange one looks slightly closer. It is the same flat paper.

Making a colour lighter or darker

There are two more moves, and they are the reason a paint box with only a few colours is enough.

• Add white and you get a tint. Red plus white makes pink. Blue plus white makes sky blue.
• Add black and you get a shade. Red plus black makes maroon. Blue plus black makes navy.

Pink is not a separate colour hiding in the box. Pink is red with white in it. Once you know that, you can make any pink you want, from barely pink to almost red.

With crayons or pencils there is no white paint, so press lightly instead: less pressure lets more white paper show through, and that is the same idea.

In short: White makes a tint. Black makes a shade. You can build a hundred colours from six.

Try it: mix these four

Work each one out in your head first, then mix it and see.

1. What do you get from blue and yellow? Answer: green.
2. What do you get from red and blue? Answer: purple.
3. What is opposite orange on the wheel? Answer: blue.
4. How do you make light green? Answer: mix blue and yellow, then add white, or press very lightly with a crayon.

One last question, and it is the interesting one. What happens if you mix all three primaries together in a puddle? Try it. You get a muddy brown, not black. Paint mixing takes light away, so the more colours you stir in, the darker and muddier it gets.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: you can mix red if you try hard enough. You cannot. Red, yellow and blue are the starting points, which is exactly what makes them primary.
• Mistake: mixing every colour gives black. Stirring paints together gives a muddy brown. Screens are different: a phone screen mixes red, green and blue light, and all of those together give white.
• Mistake: pink and brown are separate colours. Pink is red with white added. Brown is what you get when opposites are mixed. Both come out of the six colours on your wheel.
• Mistake: a colour looks the same wherever you put it. The same grey square looks darker on white paper and lighter on black paper. Colour is always partly about its neighbours.

Putting it together

• Red, yellow and blue are primary. Nothing mixes into them.
• Red and yellow give orange, yellow and blue give green, blue and red give purple.
• The wheel runs red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and back to red.
• Opposite pairs shout when they sit side by side and go muddy when mixed.
• Warm colours come forward, cool colours fall back.
• White makes a tint, black makes a shade, and dark colours are stronger, so add them slowly.

Sources

1. Vincent van Gogh. (1888). Sunflowers (NG3863). The National Gallery, London. nationalgallery.org.uk
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Primary color. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Complementary colors. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Color wheel. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Tate. (n.d.). Colour field painting. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk

A dark room with one candle in it

In the National Gallery in London hangs a painting made in 1601 by an Italian artist called Caravaggio. It shows four men round a table in a dark room.

Light comes in from the left. It lands on one man's outstretched hand so brightly that you can count his knuckles. It lands on a basket of fruit on the edge of the table. And two steps behind them, the wall is almost pure black.

Caravaggio did not paint a brighter room. He painted a darker one, and that is why the lit parts glow. This lesson is about the greys in between, which are the most useful thing in drawing that nobody teaches you.

Key idea: Light is only bright when there is dark next to it.

Value is not colour

Value means how light or dark something is. Nothing else. A lemon and a banana are different colours but almost the same value, because they are both light. A lemon and a plum are very different values.

Here is the test. Take a photograph of your kitchen and turn it black and white in your head. Everything becomes a grey. Some greys are nearly white, some are nearly black. That is value.

The point: Colour tells you what something is. Value tells you what shape it is and where the light is coming from.

Build a value strip

This takes five minutes and you will use it for the rest of your life.

1. Draw five squares in a row. Make each one about the size of a postage stamp.
2. Leave the first square completely blank. That is white, value 1.
3. In the last square, press as hard as your pencil will go, colouring until you cannot get it darker. That is black, value 5.
4. In the middle square, make a grey exactly halfway between them. Squint at it and check.
5. Fill the second square halfway between white and the middle, and the fourth halfway between the middle and black.

Now hold it at arm's length. If any two squares look the same, fix them so each step is a real step. Most people make squares 2 and 3 too close together and leave square 5 far too pale, because pressing that hard feels wrong.

Remember: One pencil can make every value from white to black. What changes is how hard you press and how many times you go over it.

Three ways to make grey

You do not have to scribble. Try each of these in a small square.

• Hatching. Lots of lines going the same way. The closer together they are, the darker it looks.
• Cross hatching. Hatching, then more lines crossing over the top. Two layers make it darker still.
• Blending. Scribble softly, then rub gently with a fingertip or a twist of paper until it goes smooth.

All three make grey. They feel different, though. Cross hatching looks scratchy and old fashioned. Blending looks soft and photographic. Pick the one that suits what you are drawing.

Turning a circle into a ball

A circle is flat. A ball is round. The only difference on paper is where you put the greys.

Put a real ball, an orange or a scrunched ball of paper, on the table. Turn on one lamp to the left of it. Then draw a circle and follow these steps.

1. Find the highlight. There is a bright spot where the light hits most directly, up and to the left. Leave that white. Do not draw on it at all.
2. Shade away from it. Get gradually darker as you move away from the highlight, using value 2, then 3.
3. Find the darkest band. The darkest part of the ball is not the very edge. It is a band just inside the edge on the far side, value 4 or 5.
4. Leave the very edge slightly lighter. Light bounces up off the table and back onto the bottom of the ball.
5. Add the cast shadow. On the table, going away from the lamp, draw a dark oval. Make it darkest right where the ball touches the table.

Look at your drawing next to a circle you have coloured in flat grey. Same pencil, same circle, and one of them sits on the table while the other one floats.

Worth holding on to: The cast shadow is what glues an object to the ground. Without it, everything floats.

Two different shadows

People say shadow to mean two different things, and it helps to keep them apart.

• The form shadow is the dark part on the object itself, the side turned away from the light.
• The cast shadow is the dark patch the object throws onto something else, like the table or the wall.

The rule for the cast shadow is simple and it never breaks: the shadow goes to the opposite side from the light. Lamp on the left, shadow to the right. Lamp high above, shadow short and squat underneath. Lamp low down, shadow long and stretched.

You can test this outside without any equipment. At noon your shadow is a small puddle round your feet. In the late afternoon it stretches ten steps across the ground, because the sun is low.

Squint

Here is a trick real artists use constantly, and it looks silly.

Half close your eyes until the room goes blurry. All the little details vanish and what is left is patches of light and dark. Suddenly you can see that the window is the brightest thing in the room and the gap under the door is the darkest, which you never noticed with your eyes wide open.

Squint at anything you are about to draw. It sorts the world into your five values for you.

Why this matters: Details hide values. Blur the details and the values become obvious.

The word for this

What Caravaggio did has a name: chiaroscuro. Say it kee-are-oh-SKOO-roh. It is two Italian words stuck together, chiaro meaning light and scuro meaning dark.

Artists have used it for four hundred years, and so do films. Next time you watch something scary, notice how much of the screen is black, and how one lamp or one torch does all the work. That is a very old painting trick still doing its job.

Try it: predict the shadow

Work each one out before you check.

1. A lamp shines on a cup from the right. Which side of the cup is dark, and which way does the cast shadow fall?
2. The sun is directly overhead. Is your shadow long or short?
3. You draw a ball with the highlight top left. Where should the darkest band be?

Answers. One: the left side of the cup is dark and the shadow falls to the left, away from the lamp. Two: short, a small puddle under your feet. Three: on the lower right, just inside the edge, with a slightly lighter rim at the very bottom where light bounces back up.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: shadows are black. Look at a shadow on a sunny pavement. It is usually a blue grey, and you can still see the pavement through it. Shadows are darker, not empty.
• Mistake: the darkest part of a ball is at the very edge. It is a band just inside the edge. The rim itself catches light bouncing off the table.
• Mistake: an outline plus flat colour will look solid. It will look like a sticker. Value is what makes a drawing look round.
• Mistake: value is the same as colour. A lemon and a banana are different colours and nearly the same value. Squinting shows you the difference.

The short version

• Value means how light or dark something is, whatever colour it happens to be.
• One pencil can make every value; pressure and layers do the work.
• Hatching, cross hatching and blending are three ways to make grey.
• A ball needs a highlight, a gradual middle, a dark band inside the far edge, and a cast shadow.
• The cast shadow always falls away from the light, and it is what stops an object floating.
• Squinting hides detail and shows you the values.

Sources

1. Caravaggio. (1601). The Supper at Emmaus (NG172). The National Gallery, London. nationalgallery.org.uk
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Chiaroscuro. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Drawing. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Tate Kids. (n.d.). Painting and drawing. Tate. tate.org.uk

An artist staring at the floorboards

In August 1925, an artist named Max Ernst was stuck in a hotel by the sea in France on a rainy day. He found himself staring at the floorboards, which were old and scrubbed, with the grain standing up in ridges.

He put a sheet of paper over a board and rubbed it with a soft pencil. The grain came up through the paper by itself, and it looked like forests and strange creatures. He liked it so much he built a whole book of pictures out of rubbings and gave the method a French name, frottage, which just means rubbing.

You can do the identical thing in the next thirty seconds with a coin.

Key idea: Every surface in your house already has a picture in it. A rubbing gets it out.

Texture: how a thing feels

Texture means the feel of a surface. Close your eyes and run your hand over five things near you: the table, your sleeve, your hair, a window, the carpet. Every one is different, and you could tell them apart without looking.

Words help here. Collect them as you go: rough, smooth, bumpy, silky, prickly, furry, sticky, gritty, glossy, crumbly, squishy.

Say the word out loud while you touch the thing. It sounds childish and it works: the words are what you will reach for when you try to draw the surface later.

Two kinds of texture

Here is the part that surprises people.

Real texture you can actually feel with your fingers. Sandpaper, a knitted jumper, tree bark, thick paint standing up off the canvas.

Visual texture is texture you can only see. A photograph of a cat is completely smooth to touch, and yet it looks furry. A pencil drawing of tree bark is flat paper, and it still looks rough.

Almost all drawing is visual texture. You are making a smooth flat surface pretend to be rough.

The point: Real texture you feel with your hand. Visual texture is a trick your eyes fall for.

Marks that make surfaces

Every texture has a mark that suggests it. Try each of these in a small box, six boxes on one page.

Surface	Mark that suggests it
Sand	Hundreds of small dots, close together
Fur	Short curved flicks, all leaning the same way
Wool	Tiny loops and circles, tangled
Wood	Long parallel lines with a few oval knots
Water	Long flat wavy lines with white gaps left blank
Brick	Rectangles in rows, each row shifted half a brick along

Cover the labels and show the boxes to someone. They will name most of them. Six marks, no colour, no outline of an object, and the surfaces are already recognisable.

Paint you can feel

Van Gogh's paintings are famous for something you cannot see in a photograph: the paint stands up off the canvas in ridges you could feel with a fingertip, if the guard let you, which they will not.

In Wheat Field with Cypresses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the clouds are built from thick curls of paint squeezed straight from the tube. The picture has real texture and visual texture at the same time. That thick paint has a name, impasto, and it is why people who have seen a van Gogh in a gallery say the postcard is not the same.

Pattern: a rule that repeats

Now put texture aside for a moment. Pattern is something else entirely.

A pattern is a design that repeats with a rule. It has two parts.

• The motif, which is the small unit that repeats. A star, a stripe, a leaf, a dot.
• The rule, which says how it repeats. Every ten centimetres. Alternating with a different motif. Turned a quarter turn each time.

Look at the room. Tiles, a striped jumper, bricks in a wall, the checks on a tea towel, the dots on a mug, the rows of squares on a chessboard. Wallpaper is pattern. Wrapping paper is pattern. So is a honeycomb, and so are the stripes on a zebra, which are a pattern nobody designed.

Remember: Texture is about a surface. Pattern is about a repeat. A tiled floor can be perfectly smooth and still be patterned.

Four repeat rules

Draw a row of about twelve boxes across your page and try each rule.

1. Simple repeat. The same motif over and over: star, star, star, star.
2. Alternating repeat. Two motifs taking turns: star, dot, star, dot. This is called an ABAB pattern.
3. Grouped repeat. One of the first, two of the second: star, dot, dot, star, dot, dot. That is ABB ABB.
4. Turning repeat. The same motif, turned a quarter turn each time, so it points up, right, down, left, and then starts again.

The turning one is the interesting one. It uses only one motif and still never looks boring, because your eye keeps finding the change.

Try to break a rule on purpose. Do star, dot, star, dot, star, star. Somebody looking will stop dead at the mistake. That is worth knowing: a broken pattern grabs attention, which is why one red button on a coat of black buttons is impossible not to notice.

Why this matters: Your eye searches for the rule automatically, and it notices the moment the rule breaks.

Try it: name the rubbing

Take five rubbings, on five separate small pieces of paper, of a coin, a leaf with the veins facing up, a brick or paving stone, a comb, and the sole of a shoe.

Now mix them up and see if a grown-up can match each rubbing to the object. Here is what usually gives them away. The coin comes out as a perfect circle with tiny raised writing. The leaf gives one thick middle line with thin ones branching off it. The brick is a big soft gritty patch. The comb is a set of straight parallel bars, evenly spaced, which is both a texture and a pattern. The shoe is the strangest and hardest, and normally the most beautiful.

In short: A rubbing records the exact bumps of a surface, so it carries more true detail than most drawings of the same thing.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: texture means the paper is bumpy. Most texture in art is visual. Flat pencil marks on flat paper can look furry, gritty or wet.
• Mistake: texture and pattern are the same word. Texture is how a surface feels. Pattern is a repeat with a rule. Sandpaper has texture and no pattern; a smooth tiled floor has pattern and almost no texture.
• Mistake: a pattern has to be colourful. Brick walls, chessboards and pencil stripes are patterns with one or two colours, or none.
• Mistake: any decoration is a pattern. A page of random scattered stars is decoration. It becomes a pattern when there is a rule you could use to predict the next star.

Looking back

• Texture is how a surface feels, or how it looks like it would feel.
• Real texture you can touch; visual texture is made with marks on flat paper.
• Dots make sand, flicks make fur, parallel lines with knots make wood.
• Max Ernst turned rubbings of floorboards into pictures in 1925 and called it frottage.
• A pattern is a motif plus a rule for repeating it.
• Breaking the rule on purpose is the fastest way to grab a viewer's eye.

Sources

1. Tate. (n.d.). Frottage. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Rubbing (art). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pattern. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Vincent van Gogh. (1889). Wheat Field with Cypresses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org

The mug that is not a circle

Put a mug on the table about two steps away. Sit down so your eyes are level with your chin at table height, and look at the rim.

The rim is a circle. You know it is a circle. You could pick it up and run your finger round it and it would be a circle the whole way.

But it does not look like one from here. It looks like a thin flat oval. And if you slide down further, until your eyes are exactly level with the tabletop, the rim turns into a single straight line.

So which do you draw? The circle you know is there, or the line your eyes are actually reporting?

The point: Drawing what you see and drawing what you know are two different jobs, and almost everybody does the second one by accident.

Where the mistake comes from

Your brain is brilliant at storing simple signs for things. It has to be, or you would spend all day working out what a chair is.

So it keeps a sign for cup: a rectangle with a circle on top and a handle like a letter D. It keeps a sign for house: a square, a triangle roof, four windows in a grid, a path. It keeps a sign for tree: a brown stick with a green cloud on it.

Those signs are useful for reading the world fast. They are terrible for drawing, because when you look at the real mug your brain quietly hands you the sign instead of the sight, and you draw the sign without ever noticing the swap happened.

Here is a test that catches it. Without looking at one, draw a bicycle from memory. Draw the frame, the chain, everything. Then find a real bicycle or a photograph and compare. Almost everyone puts the frame bars in impossible places and runs the chain round the wrong things. You have seen thousands of bicycles. You have looked at none of them.

Key idea: Looking at something is not the same as seeing it. The first is easy and the second takes work.

Fix one: blind contour

This is the strongest cure and it feels wrong the whole time you do it.

1. Put your other hand on the table in an interesting position, fingers spread and bent.
2. Put your pencil on the paper and pick a starting point on your hand, say the tip of the thumb.
3. Now stare at your hand and do not look at the paper. Not once.
4. Move your eye slowly along the edge of your hand, and move the pencil at exactly the same speed. Slowly. Where the edge dips in, dip your pencil in.
5. Stop after one minute and look.

It will be a disaster. The fingers will not join up and the thumb may be somewhere near the wrist.

Now look closer. The little wrinkles at your knuckles will be there. The exact bend of the fingernail will be there. Details your careful drawings never contain, because this time nothing came from memory. Every mark came from your eyes.

Fix two: draw the gaps

Look at a chair from the side. Between the legs and the seat there are gaps, and each gap is a shape.

You do not have a stored sign for the gap under a chair. Nobody does. So you have no choice but to look at it.

Draw the gaps first, shading them in lightly, and let the chair appear as the leftover space between them. People who have drawn wobbly chairs for years often produce a solid one on the first try this way.

Why this matters: Any trick that stops your memory from answering will improve your drawing, and drawing the gaps is the easiest of them.

Fix three: measure with your pencil

Hold your pencil out at arm's length, elbow straight, and close one eye.

1. Line the top of the pencil up with the top of the mug, and slide your thumb down the pencil until it marks the bottom of the mug. That is one mug height.
2. Keeping your thumb there, turn the pencil sideways and check the width. Is the mug wider than one mug height, or narrower?
3. Whatever you find, make it true on your paper. If the mug is one and a half times as tall as it is wide, draw it one and a half times as tall as it is wide.

You must keep your arm straight every time or the measurement changes. This one check fixes more drawings than any amount of careful shading, because getting the proportions right is most of the battle.

Fix four: check the angles

Edges that run away from you almost never run flat.

Hold your pencil up in front of the table edge, tilt it until it lies exactly along that edge, then, without changing the tilt, bring it down to your paper. Now you know the angle. Compare it to the edge of your paper: is it a little up, or a lot up?

People draw table edges flat because they know tables are flat. They almost never look flat.

Making a flat page look deep

Your paper has no depth at all. Here are three ways to fake it, and they are the same three that Claude Monet used in Garden at Sainte-Adresse in 1867, which hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The picture shows a terrace with flowers, two people sitting, two people standing at a fence, and the sea behind with boats on it.

• Overlapping. If one thing covers part of another, it is in front. This is the strongest depth clue there is, and it works even in a drawing with no shading at all.
• Size. Things further away look smaller. The boats out at sea in the Monet are tiny next to the flowers by your feet, and the flowers are not really bigger than boats.
• Position on the page. Things further away sit higher up. The terrace is at the bottom, the fence in the middle, the sea near the top.

Worth holding on to: Overlap, smaller, higher. Three simple moves, and a flat page suddenly has a front and a back.

The oval rule

Go back to the mug. Circles that tilt away from you turn into ovals, and the more they tilt, the flatter the oval gets.

• Looking straight down at the mug from above: a full circle.
• Looking at it from a chair: a fat oval.
• Looking at it from lower down: a thin oval.
• Looking at it exactly level: a straight line.

Test it. Draw the same mug three times, standing up, sitting down, and with your chin on the table. The rim changes every time and the handle changes with it. Nothing about the mug moved.

When it goes wrong

It will go wrong. Here is what to do instead of scrubbing the whole thing out.

Leave the wrong line where it is, drawn lightly, and draw the better line next to it. Old drawings by famous artists are full of doubled and tripled lines exactly like this, because that is what searching for the right line looks like.

If the whole drawing is wrong, do not fix it. Turn the page and draw it again. The second one takes a third of the time and comes out twice as good, every single time.

In short: Draw it again beside it. Do not rub out the evidence of your looking.

Try it: the same chair twice

1. Without looking at any chair, draw a chair from memory. Take two minutes.
2. Now sit in front of a real chair, side on. Measure its height and width with your pencil first. Draw the gaps between the legs. Check the angle of the seat against your pencil.
3. Put the two drawings side by side.

Here is what almost always happens. The memory chair has four legs all visible, a perfectly flat seat and a back at a right angle. The looked-at chair has one back leg hidden behind a front leg, a seat that slopes, and legs that are not the same length on the paper even though they are in real life. The second one looks like a chair in a room. The first one looks like the word chair.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: you should draw all four legs of the table because it has four. Draw the ones you can see. Hiding a leg behind another is how a drawing says that one is in front.
• Mistake: a wrong line must be erased at once. Leave it and draw a better one beside it. Searching for a line is normal, and the search marks are part of the drawing.
• Mistake: the rim of a cup should be drawn as a circle. Only if you are directly above it. From every other position it is an oval, and from table level it is a line.
• Mistake: people who draw well have a steady hand. They have a slow eye. Blind contour drawings are shaky and still catch more truth than neat ones.

What to carry forward

• Your brain stores a simple sign for every object and hands it over instead of the real thing.
• Blind contour drawing switches the sign off by keeping your eyes on the object.
• Drawing the gaps works because you have no stored sign for a gap.
• Measure with your pencil at arm's length, and check every angle against something straight.
• Overlap, smaller and higher up the page are the three ways to show depth.
• A circle tilted away from you is an oval, and it flattens as the tilt increases.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Contour drawing. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Claude Monet. (1867). Garden at Sainte-Adresse. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Drawing. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Tate Kids. (n.d.). Painting and drawing. Tate. tate.org.uk

The picture that exists in many museums

The Great Wave, the Japanese picture with the huge curling wave and the tiny mountain, is not a painting. Hokusai never made a single original of it that hangs in one place.

It was carved into blocks of cherry wood, one block for each colour. The blocks were inked, paper was laid on top, and the back of the paper was rubbed. Then it was done again. And again. Thousands of copies were printed in the 1830s, and they were cheap enough that an ordinary person could buy one.

That is why the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one, and the British Museum has one, and neither of them is the fake. Both are the real thing.

Key idea: A print is made from a surface that can be used again, so one picture can exist in hundreds of places at once.

What printing actually is

Printing has three steps, whatever you print with.

1. Make a surface with raised parts and low parts. A carved block, a cut potato, a bottle cap.
2. Put ink or paint on the raised parts only.
3. Press paper onto it. The raised parts touch the paper. The low parts do not.

The low parts stay the colour of the paper. So on a stamp, whatever you cut away comes out white.

That last sentence is the one that trips people up, and it is worth reading twice. When you carve, you are not drawing the picture. You are carving away everything that is not the picture.

The flip

Here is the surprise that gets everybody the first time.

Cut the letter R into a potato and print it. It comes out backwards.

Of course it does. The stamp faces the paper, so it lands the other way round, exactly as your face does in a mirror. If you want an R to print, you must cut a backwards R.

You can prove it in ten seconds without cutting anything. Write your name in pencil, pressing hard. Fold the paper over onto the writing and rub the back with your thumbnail. Open it: a faint mirrored copy of your name has transferred over.

Remember: Every print is a mirror of the block that made it. Letters and numbers have to be made backwards.

Four ways to print without buying anything

• Found object stamps. A cork end, a bottle cap, the bumpy side of a piece of cardboard, the flat end of a wooden block, half a lemon. Dip in paint, press, lift.
• Potato or apple stamp. An adult cuts a potato in half. Draw a simple shape on the cut face with a felt pen and let the adult cut away everything outside your line, about as deep as a fingernail.
• Cardboard edge printing. Cut a strip of cereal box. Dip the long thin edge in paint and press: you get a perfect straight line. Curve the strip and you get a curved line.
• Pencil transfer print. No paint at all. Scribble a thick patch of soft pencil on a scrap of paper. Lay it scribble side down on clean paper. Draw firmly on the back of the scrap, and the pencil transfers wherever you press. Lift it: your drawing has printed, with a lovely soft grainy line.

Whichever you use, print the same stamp at least six times. That is the whole point of a print. One stamp, many pictures, and each one comes out slightly different because of how much paint was on it.

Why artists number their prints

Look at the bottom of a print in a gallery and you may see something like 4 of 20 written in pencil.

It means the artist decided to make twenty and this is the fourth one. Then the block gets destroyed or set aside, so no more can appear. The set is called an edition.

Hokusai's publisher had no such rule. They printed the Great Wave until the wooden blocks wore out from use, which is why the later copies have blurrier lines than the early ones.

An old man with scissors

In 1953, Henri Matisse made a picture called The Snail. It is at Tate in London, and it is nearly three metres across.

There is no paint on it in the way you would expect. Matisse was in his eighties and too ill to stand at an easel, so he had assistants paint large sheets of paper in flat colours. Then he sat with a pair of scissors and cut the shapes straight out of the coloured paper, with no drawing first.

The shapes are pinned round in a spiral: orange, green, purple, blue. If you did not know the title you might not see a snail at all. You would still see the spiral.

Cutting shapes out and sticking them down has a name. It is called collage, from the French word for gluing.

Why this matters: Matisse could not hold a brush at the easel any more, so he changed the method instead of stopping. The Snail is one of the best known works he ever made.

Collage with what is in the recycling

You need scraps and glue. Try these sources, all free.

• Old magazines and catalogues, especially pages of flat colour rather than pictures.
• Envelopes, including the patterned paper inside them.
• Cereal boxes, for thicker shapes that sit slightly proud of the page.
• Newspaper, for grey texture.
• Paper you painted or coloured yourself, which is what Matisse used.

Two rules make collages better. Cut big shapes first, and lay everything out without glue until you like it. Only then stick anything down. The moving stage is where the picture actually gets made.

You can tear as well as cut. A torn edge gives a soft white fuzzy line and a cut edge gives a hard sharp one, and using both in one picture is a quick way to make it interesting.

Try it: predict the print

Answer these before you test them.

1. You cut a heart shape into a potato, leaving the heart raised. What colour is the heart on the paper, and what colour is the background?
2. You carve the number 7 the right way round. What prints?
3. You print the same stamp five times without adding more paint. How do the five prints differ?

Answers. One: the heart prints in paint and the background stays paper coloured, because only raised parts touch. Two: a backwards 7, because the block is a mirror of the print. Three: the first is the boldest and each one gets paler as the paint runs out, which artists call a ghost print and often keep on purpose.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: a print is just a copy, so it is not real art. The artist made the block, chose the ink and pulled the prints. Every impression is an original object, which is why museums collect them.
• Mistake: what you carve is what prints. The opposite. What you carve away prints as paper. The parts you leave standing are the picture.
• Mistake: a stamp prints exactly what it looks like. It prints a mirror image, so letters and numbers must be cut backwards.
• Mistake: collage is what you do when you cannot draw. Matisse made his cut paper works at the end of sixty years of drawing, and they are among the most famous things he did.

Summing up

• A print is made from a reusable surface, so one picture can exist in many places at once.
• Ink sits on the raised parts. Whatever you cut away comes out the colour of the paper.
• Every print is a mirror image of its block.
• Corks, cardboard edges, cut potatoes and a patch of pencil scribble all make good printing surfaces.
• Collage means cutting or tearing shapes and gluing them down. Matisse built The Snail that way in 1953.
• Arrange everything before you glue, and mix torn soft edges with cut sharp ones.

Sources

1. Katsushika Hokusai. (ca. 1830-32). Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
2. Henri Matisse. (1953). The Snail (T00540). Tate. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Woodcut. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk
4. Tate. (n.d.). Collage. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Woodblock printing. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A wall made of old chair legs

In 1959 an artist called Louise Nevelson made a piece now at Tate in London called Black Wall. It is a stack of wooden boxes, and inside the boxes are scraps: chunks of banister, chair legs, offcuts, bits of furniture that somebody threw out.

Every single piece is painted black. Not almost black. All exactly the same black, so you stop seeing chair legs and start seeing shapes, shadows and the dark spaces between them.

She built a serious work of art out of the contents of a skip and a tin of paint. You have a recycling bin and this lesson is going to do the same thing.

Key idea: One coat of a single colour turns a pile of junk into a set of shapes, because the eye stops naming the objects.

What makes it sculpture

A drawing is flat. It has height and width, and that is all. We call it two dimensional, or 2D.

A sculpture has height, width and depth. Three dimensional, or 3D. You can walk round it, look at the back, crouch and look up at it.

Which means a sculpture has no single correct view. A drawing has one. A sculpture has hundreds, and every one of them is part of the work, including the back, which people making their first sculpture almost always forget.

The point: Turn your sculpture round while you build it, or the back will be a mess and the back is half the work.

Shapes grow up into forms

Every flat shape has a solid relative.

Flat shape (2D)	Solid form (3D)	Something that is one
Circle	Sphere	An orange
Square	Cube	A dice
Rectangle	Cuboid	A cereal box
Triangle	Cone	An ice cream cone
Circle	Cylinder	A tin of beans

Go and find one of each in the kitchen. It takes about a minute and it makes the words stick better than reading them does.

Four ways to make a sculpture

• Carving takes material away. A stone statue starts as a block and everything that is not the statue is chipped off. You can carve a bar of soap with a lolly stick.
• Modelling squashes and adds. Clay, dough, plasticine. You can push it back in if you hate it.
• Constructing joins separate pieces. Boxes, paper, wire, sticks. This is what Nevelson did, and it is what you will do.
• Casting pours something runny into a mould and lets it set, like a jelly or a bronze statue.

Carving and modelling are opposites: one takes away, one adds. Constructing is the friendliest at a kitchen table, because nothing is wasted and you can take it apart again.

Paper is stronger than you think

Take one sheet of ordinary paper and try to stand a book on it. It collapses instantly.

Now roll the same sheet into a tight tube and tape the seam. Stand the tube on end and rest the book on top. It holds. Nothing was added: same paper, same weight. What changed was the shape.

Try a third version. Fold the sheet backwards and forwards into a concertina, like a fan, and stand it on its folded edge. That holds a book too, and it holds it across a gap.

This is why cardboard has a wiggly layer inside, and why bridges have triangles in them.

Why this matters: Strength does not come only from the material. Shape does most of the work.

Six things to do to a piece of paper

1. Fold it sharply with a fingernail.
2. Roll it into a tube, tight or loose.
3. Fringe it: cut lines in from one edge, not all the way across.
4. Curl a fringe by pulling each strip over the edge of a ruler or a scissor blade.
5. Concertina it: fold one way, then the other, over and over.
6. Slot it: cut a slit in one piece and a slit in another, then slide them together.

That last one deserves attention. Two slotted pieces hold each other with no glue and no tape at all. Cut four circles, put a slit halfway into each, and slot them together into a ball shape. Museums sell that as a toy, and it is one sheet of card.

Balance, and why Calder's mobiles turn

Alexander Calder hung cut metal shapes from wires so that they balance and turn in a breath of air. Tate has several of them.

Make one. You need a drinking straw or a pencil, thread, and small weights, which can be paperclips or blobs of sticky tack.

1. Tie a thread round the middle of the straw and hold it up. The straw should hang level.
2. Hang one paperclip from the left end and one from the right end. Still level.
3. Now hang two paperclips on the right. It tips.
4. Do not add weight to the left. Instead, slide the hanging thread towards the heavier side until it balances again.

Sliding the thread works, and it teaches the rule: a heavier weight balances a lighter one if the heavy one is closer to the middle. A big child and a small child can balance on a seesaw the same way, with the big one sitting nearer the pivot.

Once one straw balances, hang a second straw from one end of it and balance that one too. Calder built whole trees this way.

Worth holding on to: Balance is not about equal weight. It is about weight and distance together.

Build like Nevelson

Here is the project this lesson has been aiming at.

1. Find a shallow box: a shoebox lid, a cereal box cut in half, a takeaway tray.
2. Collect twelve to twenty small objects with interesting shapes. Cotton reels, bottle tops, cardboard tubes, pasta shapes, buttons, lolly sticks, a broken peg, screwed up paper balls.
3. Arrange them inside the box. Fill the space. Push things into the corners and stack some on top of others so the surface is not flat.
4. Glue them down.
5. Paint the whole thing, box and contents, in one single colour. If you have no paint, cover it all in one colour of paper or rub over it with one crayon.

The last step is the one that does the magic, and it is the step people want to skip. While the objects are different colours, you see a bottle top and a button. Once everything is one colour, you see circles, cylinders, ridges and shadows.

Try it: predict what holds

1. Which holds a book better, a flat sheet of paper or the same sheet rolled into a tube?
2. A straw balances with one paperclip each side. You add a second clip on the right. Which way do you slide the thread?
3. Why paint an assemblage all one colour?

Answers. One: the tube, easily, because the shape carries the load. Two: slide the thread to the right, towards the heavier side. Three: so the eye stops recognising objects and starts seeing shapes and shadows, which is exactly what Nevelson wanted.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: sculpture means carving stone. Carving is one of four methods. Constructing from boxes and paper is just as much sculpture, and it is what many of the most famous modern works are.
• Mistake: a sculpture only needs to look good from the front. There is no front. Turn it as you work or you will build a shell with a mess behind it.
• Mistake: paper is too weak to build with. Rolled or folded paper holds a book. Flat paper holds nothing. The material did not change, the shape did.
• Mistake: a mobile balances when both sides weigh the same. Only if the arms are the same length. Heavier and closer balances lighter and further away.

Where this leaves us

• Sculpture is 3D: height, width and depth, with no single correct view.
• Flat shapes have solid relatives: circle and sphere, square and cube, triangle and cone.
• You can carve, model, construct or cast. Constructing suits a kitchen table best.
• Rolling and folding turn weak paper into a structure that holds weight.
• Slots join paper with no glue at all.
• A mobile balances by weight and distance together, which is why sliding the thread works.
• Painting an assemblage one colour turns junk into shapes, as Nevelson did in 1959.

Sources

1. Louise Nevelson. (1959). Black Wall (T00514). Tate. tate.org.uk
2. Tate. (n.d.). Alexander Calder 1898-1976. Tate. tate.org.uk
3. Tate. (n.d.). Sculpture. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk
4. Tate. (n.d.). Assemblage. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Alexander Calder. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Four notes in Vienna

On 22 December 1808, in a freezing theatre in Vienna, an orchestra played a new symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. It begins with four notes.

Three short ones and one long one. Da-da-da-DUM. That is all. No tune yet, no words, just a rhythm.

Those four notes then come back for the whole rest of the movement, hidden in the horns, buried in the cellos, thrown between instruments. More than two hundred years later, people who have never been to a concert can tap that rhythm.

Key idea: A rhythm can be famous all by itself, with no tune attached to it at all.

The beat: the thing you tap your foot to

Put two fingers on the side of your neck and find your pulse. It goes on and on, evenly, without you doing anything. That is what a beat is in music: a steady pulse that keeps going underneath everything else.

A clock ticking has a beat. Feet walking have a beat. A dripping tap has a beat.

Now put on any song you like and tap your foot. You will find the beat within a couple of seconds, and so will everybody else in the room, and you will almost all tap together. Nobody taught you this.

Remember: The beat is steady and it never speeds up or slows down inside a song, even when the singing gets busy.

Rhythm is what rides on top

Here is the difference that confuses almost everyone, so we will do it with a song you know.

Sing Happy Birthday and clap only the steady beat. Slow, even claps. Now sing it again and clap every syllable of the words instead: Hap-py-birth-day-to-you. Those claps are not even. Some are quick and squashed together, some are long.

The first one is the beat. The second one is the rhythm: the pattern of long and short sounds that the words and the tune actually make.

The beat is the floor. The rhythm is the dance happening on it.

The point: Beat is steady and hidden. Rhythm is uneven and it is the part you notice.

Clap your name

Every name has a rhythm in it, made of its syllables.

• Tom is one sound. One clap.
• Mo-lly is two. Two quick claps.
• Fa-ti-ma is three.
• A-le-jan-dro is four.
• E-liz-a-beth is four, and A-nn-a-bel-la is five.

Now clap the names of everybody in your house, one after another, keeping a steady beat going with your foot the whole time. The claps get busy on the long names and thin out on the short ones, and your foot never changes.

That is exactly what a drummer is doing while a singer sings.

Long, short, and a way to say them

Music teachers use two silly words that make rhythms easy to say out loud.

• Ta is one sound that lasts one whole beat.
• Ti-ti is two quick sounds that share one beat, so each one is half a beat.

Try clapping these four beat patterns. Say them out loud first, then clap while your foot keeps the beat.

1. ta, ta, ta, ta. Four even claps, one per beat.
2. ti-ti, ta, ti-ti, ta. Busy, slow, busy, slow.
3. ta, ti-ti, ti-ti, ta.
4. ti-ti, ti-ti, ti-ti, ta.

Every one of those lasts exactly four beats even though the number of claps changes from four to seven. That is the whole idea: the beats stay put, and the sounds inside them can be split up.

The silence counts too

Put your hands out and then, on beat three, do nothing. Clap, clap, silence, clap.

That silence is a rest, and it is part of the rhythm, not a gap in it. The beat carries on right through it. Rests are why some music sounds so full of energy: the sudden holes make the sounds around them jump out.

Try clapping ta, ta, rest, ta while your foot keeps going. If your foot stopped during the rest, do it again. Feet do not stop.

Beats come in groups

Beats do not just run on forever the same. They gather into small groups, and the first beat of each group feels stronger.

Count out loud with a louder ONE: ONE two three four, ONE two three four. That is groups of four, and most pop songs, marches and nursery rhymes use it. It is the grouping you march to, because you have two feet and four splits evenly into two.

Now count ONE two three, ONE two three. Groups of three. That is a waltz, and it feels like it is turning. Happy Birthday is in threes, which is why it always seems to lean forward and go round.

Grouping	Counts like	Feels like	Try this song
Fours	ONE two three four	Marching, walking	Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Threes	ONE two three	Turning, swaying	Happy Birthday

Why this matters: Once you can hear whether a piece is in threes or fours, you can join in with it correctly without being told.

A pattern that repeats and repeats

Pick a short rhythm, say ti-ti ta ti-ti ta, and repeat it over and over without stopping while somebody else sings a song over the top.

A repeating rhythm pattern like that is called an ostinato. It is what a drum loop is in a pop song, and it is the oldest trick in music: one person holds the pattern so everyone else can lean on it.

You do not need a drum. Your body has four instruments built in: clap, stamp, click your fingers, and pat your knees. Each one has a different sound, and you can build a whole rhythm piece from them.

Try it: which is which?

Answer before you check.

1. You tap your foot slowly and evenly through a whole song. Is that the beat or the rhythm?
2. You clap every syllable of the words. Beat or rhythm?
3. How many claps in the name Ben-ja-min?
4. How many beats does ti-ti ta ti-ti ta last?

Answers. One: the beat, because it is steady and even. Two: the rhythm, because it is uneven and follows the words. Three: three claps. Four: four beats, even though there are six sounds in it.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: beat and rhythm mean the same thing. The beat is the steady pulse underneath. The rhythm is the uneven pattern of sounds on top of it. Clapping Happy Birthday shows the difference in ten seconds.
• Mistake: the beat speeds up when the music gets busy. More notes are being squeezed into the same beats. That is why keeping your foot going is the test.
• Mistake: a rest means the music stops. A rest is a sound-shaped hole in the rhythm. The beat runs straight through it.
• Mistake: you need an instrument to play a rhythm. Clap, stamp, click and pat give you four different sounds and no equipment at all.

What you now know

• The beat is the steady pulse you tap your foot to. It does not change inside a song.
• Rhythm is the uneven pattern of long and short sounds that rides on top of the beat.
• Every name has a rhythm made of its syllables.
• Ta is one beat, ti-ti splits one beat into two, and both fit into the same steady pulse.
• A rest is a silence that still takes up time.
• Beats group into fours, which march, and threes, which sway.
• Beethoven built a whole movement out of four notes: three short and one long.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Beat (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Rhythm. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. San Francisco Symphony. (n.d.). SFS Kids: Music discovery and learning. San Francisco Symphony. sfskids.org

The biggest instrument and the smallest

At the back of an orchestra stands the double bass. It is taller than the person playing it, who has to stand up or perch on a tall stool to reach the strings.

Somewhere near the front is the piccolo. It is a flute about the length of your forearm, and it fits in a coat pocket.

Now here is the thing you can guess before you have ever heard either of them. The huge one makes a deep growly sound and the tiny one makes a piercing whistle. You already know the rule. This lesson is about why it is true and what you can do with it.

Key idea: Big and long and loose make low sounds. Small and short and tight make high sounds.

Pitch: high and low

Pitch means how high or how low a sound is.

Try it with your own voice. Sing a low note, as low as you comfortably can, and put your hand on your chest. You will feel it buzzing in there. Now slide your voice up as high as it will go, like a mouse or a squeaky gate, and put your hand on the top of your head. The buzz has moved.

Nothing about your body changed except how fast the little folds in your throat are shaking. Fast shaking makes a high sound. Slow shaking makes a low one.

Remember: Pitch is about high and low. It has nothing to do with loud and soft.

The mistake almost everybody makes

Ask a room of people to sing higher and half of them will sing louder.

They are different things and you can prove it in four goes. Sing a low note quietly. Now the same low note loudly. Now a high note quietly. Now that high note loudly.

Four different sounds from two ideas. High and low is pitch. Quiet and loud is volume, and the next lesson is about that.

A mouse squeaking is high and quiet. A lion roaring is low and loud. But a whale can be low and very loud indeed, and a tiny bird can be high and quiet enough that you miss it.

Five glasses and a spoon

Line up five glasses. Put a tiny bit of water in the first, a bit more in the second, and so on, until the fifth is nearly full. Tap each one gently on the side with a metal spoon.

Listen. The one with the least water makes the highest sound. The nearly full one makes the lowest. Going along the row, the pitch slides down.

Why? When you tap the glass, the glass and the water inside it shake together. More water means more stuff to shake, so it shakes more slowly, and slow shaking means a low sound.

Here is a genuine surprise. Do not tap this time. Blow gently across the top of each glass, like blowing over a bottle. Now the nearly full glass makes the highest sound and the almost empty one is lowest, which is the exact opposite.

When you blow, you are not shaking the water at all. You are shaking the column of air above it, and a full glass has only a short bit of air left in it. Short air, high sound.

Why this matters: Ask what is actually vibrating. Tapping shakes the water, blowing shakes the air, and they give opposite answers.

The rubber band test

Stretch a rubber band round an empty tissue box or an open jar and pluck it.

Now change one thing at a time.

• Pull it tighter. The sound goes up. Tighter is higher, which is why a violinist turns a peg to tune a string.
• Press a finger halfway along and pluck one side. The sound goes up, because the shaking part is now shorter. That is exactly what a guitarist does.
• Swap to a fatter band. The sound goes down. Thicker is lower, which is why the strings on a guitar are different thicknesses.

Three rules, one rubber band, and between them they explain every string instrument in the world.

Steps and slides

Sing the sound of a fire engine, sliding up and down without stopping anywhere. That is a slide, and it has no separate notes in it at all.

Now sing doh re mi fa so la ti doh. That is a scale: eight separate notes climbing like stairs, each one a step higher than the last.

Nearly all the songs you know are built from steps like these rather than slides. Sing the scale again and then sing it backwards, coming down. Coming down is harder, and everybody finds it harder, so if it wobbles you are in normal company.

Drawing a tune

You do not need to read music to write down the shape of a tune. Draw it as a line.

Take Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Sing it slowly and move your hand up and down in the air with the notes.

• Twin-kle: two notes the same. Your hand stays flat.
• twin-kle: your hand jumps up and stays there for two notes.
• lit-tle: up one step, and stays.
• star: down one step.
• How I wonder what you are: the line walks down, one step at a time, back to where it started.

The shape of that line is called the contour of the melody, and it is the reason you can recognise a tune whistled by a stranger in a completely different key. The notes are all different. The shape is the same.

The point: A tune is a shape as much as it is a set of notes.

Try it: predict the pitch

Say high or low for each one, then test the ones you can.

1. A big drum compared with a small drum.
2. A short piece of straw you blow through compared with a long one.
3. A rubber band stretched very tight compared with a floppy one.
4. A glass with a lot of water in it, tapped with a spoon, compared with an almost empty one.
5. The same full glass, but blown across instead of tapped.

Answers. One: the big drum is lower. Two: the short straw is higher. Three: the tight band is higher. Four: the full glass is lower. Five: now the full glass is higher, because you are shaking the short column of air instead of the water.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: high means loud. A mouse is high and quiet, a lion is low and loud, and a piccolo can play a high note softly. Pitch and volume are two separate dials.
• Mistake: a big instrument is louder. A double bass is huge because it is low, not because it is loud. A tiny piccolo can cut through a whole orchestra.
• Mistake: more water in a glass always means a lower note. Only if you tap it. Blow across the top and more water gives a higher note, because you are shaking the air, not the water.
• Mistake: you have to read music to write a tune down. Drawing the up and down shape of the line records the melody well enough for anyone to follow it.

The takeaway

• Pitch means how high or low a sound is, and it is not the same as loud or soft.
• Fast vibration gives a high sound, slow vibration gives a low one.
• Long, big, thick and loose all give lower sounds; short, small, thin and tight give higher ones.
• Tapping a glass shakes the water; blowing across it shakes the air, and the two rules run opposite ways.
• A scale climbs in separate steps, unlike a fire engine slide.
• A tune has a shape, its contour, and the shape is what you recognise.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Pitch (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). String instrument. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. San Francisco Symphony. (n.d.). SFS Kids: Music discovery and learning. San Francisco Symphony. sfskids.org
4. Classics for Kids. (n.d.). Classics for Kids. Cincinnati Public Radio. classicsforkids.com

The chord that wakes you up

In 1791 Joseph Haydn wrote a symphony, his ninety fourth, for concerts in London. The slow movement begins with a simple little tune, played very quietly, the sort of thing you could hum to a baby.

It plays through once. Then it starts again, even quieter. And then, with no warning at all, the whole orchestra including the drums plays one enormous crashing chord.

It is still called the Surprise Symphony. People have told the story ever since that Haydn wanted to wake up anybody dozing in the cheap seats. Whether or not that was really his reason, the chord works, and it works because of what came before it. One loud noise on its own is just a noise. A loud noise after two minutes of quiet is a shock.

Key idea: Loud only feels loud next to soft. The contrast does the work.

Two dials on every piece of music

Any tune you can sing has two dials you can turn without changing a single note.

• Volume, which musicians call dynamics: how loud or soft.
• Speed, which musicians call tempo: how fast or slow.

Prove it with Happy Birthday. Sing it four ways: loud and fast, loud and slow, soft and fast, soft and slow.

Same notes, same words, same rhythm, four completely different feelings. The soft slow one sounds sad, almost like a lullaby. The loud fast one sounds like a party. Nothing was added or taken away.

Why this matters: The notes are only half of the music. How you play them is the other half.

The Italian words, and why they are Italian

Composers write instructions on the music in Italian, because a lot of the earliest printed music came out of Italy and the habit stuck. There are only a few you need.

Word	Short for	What it means
piano	p	Soft
forte	f	Loud
mezzo piano	mp	Medium soft
mezzo forte	mf	Medium loud
fortissimo	ff	Very loud
pianissimo	pp	Very soft

Notice something. The instrument called the piano is named after the word for soft. Its full old name was the pianoforte, the soft-loud, because when it was invented you could play soft and loud on it by hitting the keys harder or more gently. The instrument it replaced, the harpsichord, plucked its strings and gave you the same volume however hard you pressed. The whole instrument is named after this lesson.

Getting louder, getting softer

Music does not only jump between loud and soft. It slides.

• A crescendo is getting gradually louder. Say it kre-SHEN-doh.
• A diminuendo is getting gradually softer.

Try one. Start whispering your own name over and over, and over about ten repeats grow it into a shout. Then take ten repeats to shrink it back to a whisper. That is a crescendo followed by a diminuendo, and every film score you have ever heard is stuffed with them.

A crescendo makes you lean in. It tells your body that something is coming.

Speed words

Tempo has its own set of Italian words, and they are useful because they describe a feeling rather than a number.

Word	Roughly	Move like
largo	Very slow and broad	A cat stretching
adagio	Slow	Walking through deep water
andante	Walking pace	Walking to school
allegro	Fast and cheerful	Skipping
presto	Very fast	Running for a bus

Walk round the room at each of those five speeds. It sounds like a game and it is the fastest way to make the words mean something, because tempo is a body word before it is a music word.

Two more: accelerando means getting faster, and ritardando means getting slower.

Both dials at once

In 1875 Edvard Grieg wrote a short piece for a play, called In the Hall of the Mountain King. Find it if you can, because it is the clearest example of this idea in all of music.

It begins with a sneaky little tune played very quietly and quite slowly, low down, plucked and tiptoeing. The same tune then repeats, again and again, and with every repeat it gets a bit faster and a bit louder and climbs higher. By the end the whole orchestra is hammering it at top speed and full volume, and it stops with a bang.

The tune barely changes across the whole piece. What changes is the two dials, both turned in the same direction at once. That is why it feels like something is chasing you.

The point: Turning both dials up together is the standard recipe for excitement, and it works every time.

One loud note in a quiet place

A single note played harder than the ones round it has a name: an accent.

Clap a steady eight beats, and on beat five clap much harder. Suddenly the row of claps has a shape. That is all an accent is, and drummers build entire patterns from where they put them.

Silence works the same way. Stop dead in the middle of a loud passage and everybody in the room looks up.

Try it: match the music to the moment

Choose loud or soft, and fast or slow, for each. There is no single right answer, but there is a usual one.

1. A lullaby for a baby.
2. A march for a parade.
3. A storm arriving in a film.
4. A mouse creeping across a kitchen at night.

Usual answers. One: soft and slow. Two: loud and at a steady walking or marching pace, not too fast, because people have to march to it. Three: a crescendo from soft to very loud, usually with an accelerando too. Four: very soft, quite quick and light, low or high but always quiet, which is exactly how Grieg starts the Mountain King.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: fast means loud. They are separate dials. A fast quiet passage sounds sneaky and busy; a slow loud one sounds huge and heavy.
• Mistake: high means loud too. Pitch is a third dial again. High and quiet, low and loud, and every other combination are all available.
• Mistake: piano just means the big black instrument. The word means soft. The instrument is named pianoforte because it could do both, which the harpsichord before it could not.
• Mistake: playing loudly all the time is exciting. If everything is loud, nothing is. Haydn's chord shocks people because two minutes of quiet came first.

Putting it together

• Dynamics means loud and soft; tempo means fast and slow. They are separate.
• Piano means soft, forte means loud, and the piano is named after the word.
• A crescendo grows louder; a diminuendo fades away.
• Largo, adagio, andante, allegro and presto go from very slow to very fast.
• Grieg turns both dials up together in In the Hall of the Mountain King, and the tune hardly changes at all.
• Loud only feels loud after quiet, which is the whole trick of Haydn's Surprise Symphony.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Dynamics (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Tempo. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Symphony No. 94 (Haydn). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). In the Hall of the Mountain King. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Classics for Kids. (n.d.). Classics for Kids. Cincinnati Public Radio. classicsforkids.com

Three songs, one tune

Sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Now sing Baa Baa Black Sheep. Now sing the alphabet song, A B C D E F G.

Stop. They are the same tune.

Not similar. Identical, note for note. The melody is a French one that was printed in 1761 with completely different words, and Mozart liked it enough to write a whole set of variations on it when he was in his twenties.

One melody, at least three sets of words, and you learned all three without ever noticing they were the same shape.

Key idea: A melody is a thing on its own. Words can be swapped onto it and it stays the same melody.

What a melody is made of

A melody is the tune: the part you sing in the bath, the part you whistle, the part you would hum if somebody asked you to do the song.

It is made of two of the things you already know, stuck together.

• Pitch, from the last lesson but one: which notes are high and which are low.
• Rhythm, from two lessons ago: how long each note lasts.

Change either one and you get a different tune. Sing Twinkle with all the notes the same length and it goes flat and dull. Sing the right rhythm on one single note and it is not a tune at all, it is a chant.

The point: Melody is pitch and rhythm together. Neither one alone is a tune.

Phrases: the sentences of music

Sing Twinkle again slowly and notice where you naturally breathe.

You breathe after "little star". You breathe again after "what you are". Those chunks are called phrases, and a phrase in music does the same job a sentence does in speech: it is a complete thought with a small stop at the end.

Twinkle is built from short phrases of the same length, which is one reason small children learn it so easily. Each one is exactly long enough for one breath.

Try this. Sing the first phrase and stop dead. It feels unfinished, like a question. Sing the second and it feels answered. Composers do this on purpose and it is called question and answer.

Repeat, change, come back

Songs are built out of a very small number of moves, and the main one is repeating.

Label the parts of Twinkle with letters. Give the first tune the letter A. When something different arrives, call it B.

• Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. That is A, sung twice over.
• Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. That is B, a different, higher tune, also sung twice.
• Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. A comes back.

So the shape is A, then B, then A. Almost every song you know is a set of letters like that.

Why does it work? Repeating gives your ear something familiar to hold. Contrast stops it getting boring. Coming back at the end makes it feel finished, like arriving home.

Remember: Repeat, change, come back. That is the shape of most songs ever written.

Verse and chorus

Pop songs use the same idea with different names.

Part	What happens to the tune	What happens to the words
Verse	Same tune each time	New words each time, telling the story
Chorus	Same tune each time	Same words each time, and usually the title
Bridge	A new tune, once only	New words, often a change of mood

Think of a song you know well and try to name its verse and its chorus. The chorus is almost always the bit you knew first and the bit everybody joins in on, which is exactly what it is designed for.

Steps and leaps

Melodies move in two ways, and mixing them is what makes a good tune.

• A step goes to the note right next door, up or down. Doh to re. Smooth and easy to sing.
• A leap jumps over notes. Doh straight up to soh. Exciting and harder to sing.

Twinkle starts with a leap, from the first twinkle to the second, and then walks down in steps for the rest of the line. That is a very common recipe: one bold jump, then a gentle walk back.

Sing a tune made only of steps and it sounds like a scale exercise. Sing one made only of leaps and it is nearly impossible to sing at all. Mix them.

Why the last note feels like the last note

Here is a small experiment that works on everybody.

Sing the scale upwards, doh re mi fa so la ti, and stop. Do not sing the last note.

It is uncomfortable. Something in you wants that final doh, and if you leave it long enough somebody else in the room will sing it for you.

That final note is called home, or the tonic. Nearly every tune you know ends on it, and that is why the ending sounds like an ending rather than a stop.

Test it on Twinkle: the last note of "what you are" is the same note as the very first note of the song. You went away and came back.

Why this matters: If your made up tune feels unfinished, the usual cure is to end it on the note it started on.

Make one up: the eight note rule

You can write a real melody in about five minutes, with no instrument and no music reading.

1. Number the notes of the scale 1 to 8, where 1 is doh, the home note, and 8 is doh again at the top.
2. Write down eight numbers. Start on 1 and end on 1. For example: 1 3 5 3 4 2 3 1.
3. Sing your numbers, using the scale to find each note. Go slowly.
4. Now give it a rhythm. Make some notes long and some short, using ta and ti-ti.
5. Sing it again with the rhythm. That is a melody, and it is yours.

Two tips that will improve almost any first attempt. Use mostly steps with one or two leaps, and repeat something. Try making notes 5 to 8 an echo of notes 1 to 4 with a small change at the end.

Try it: name the shape

Work these out before checking.

1. A song goes: tune, same tune, different tune, first tune again. What letters is that?
2. Where do you breathe in a song, at the end of a phrase or in the middle of one?
3. Your made up tune ends on note 5 and feels unfinished. What is the quickest fix?
4. Twinkle Twinkle and Baa Baa Black Sheep: same tune or different?

Answers. One: A A B A. Two: at the end of a phrase, which is why phrases are about one breath long. Three: end on note 1, the home note. Four: the same tune, along with the alphabet song, all three sharing a French melody printed in 1761.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: a good melody has to be complicated. Twinkle uses six notes and mostly steps, and it has survived for over two hundred and fifty years.
• Mistake: the words are the song. Swap the words and the melody is untouched, which is how one French tune became three different nursery songs in English.
• Mistake: repeating a bit is lazy. Repetition is how a listener holds on. The trick is repeat, change, and then come back.
• Mistake: you need to read music to write a tune. Numbers for pitches and ta and ti-ti for rhythm will record a melody well enough for anyone to sing it back.

Pulling it together

• A melody is pitch and rhythm together: the part you would hum.
• A phrase is a musical sentence, about one breath long.
• Label sections A and B: most songs are repeat, change, come back.
• Verses keep the tune and change the words; a chorus keeps both.
• Steps move to the next note, leaps jump over notes, and good tunes mix them.
• Ending on the home note is what makes an ending feel finished.
• You can compose an eight note melody with numbers alone.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Melody. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Harmony. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. San Francisco Symphony. (n.d.). SFS Kids: Music discovery and learning. San Francisco Symphony. sfskids.org

A wolf made of three horns

In 1936 the Central Children's Theatre in Moscow asked Sergei Prokofiev to write something for children. He wrote a story with music called Peter and the Wolf, and he did something nobody had quite done before: he gave every character its own instrument.

The bird is a flute, fluttering and quick. The duck is an oboe, with a slightly whiny, nasal sound. The cat is a clarinet playing low and smooth, creeping. Grandfather is a bassoon, deep and grumbling. Peter is the strings. And the wolf is three French horns playing together, which is a genuinely frightening noise.

Children who hear it a few times can follow the story with their eyes shut, because they can hear which character has walked in. That is the point of this lesson: instruments have voices, and you can learn them.

Key idea: Every instrument has a sound of its own, and once you know it you never lose it.

Four families

An orchestra has about eighty players and they are sorted into four groups called families.

Here is the important bit, and it is not what people expect. Instruments are grouped by how they make their sound, not by what they are made of.

Family	How the sound is made	Examples
Strings	A stretched string vibrates, rubbed with a bow or plucked with a finger	Violin, viola, cello, double bass, harp, guitar
Woodwind	Air vibrates inside a tube, split by a sharp edge or wobbled by a reed	Flute, piccolo, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, recorder
Brass	The player's lips buzz into a cup shaped mouthpiece	Trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba
Percussion	Something is hit, shaken or scraped	Drums, timpani, xylophone, triangle, cymbals, tambourine

The flute problem

A modern flute is made of metal. Sometimes silver. So why is it woodwind and not brass?

Because of how it works. To play a flute you blow across a hole and the moving air splits on the far edge, which sets the air inside the tube shaking. To play a trumpet you press your lips together and buzz them, like blowing a raspberry, into a little cup.

Lips buzzing means brass. Air splitting on an edge, or a thin reed wobbling, means woodwind. It has nothing to do with the metal.

The saxophone settles it. It is made of brass, it is shiny and gold, and it is a woodwind instrument, because it has a wooden reed that vibrates against the mouthpiece.

Remember: The family tells you how the sound is made, not what the instrument is made of.

Inside each family, size sets the pitch

You already know this rule from the glasses of water. Bigger and longer means lower.

Look at the string family, from smallest to biggest: violin, viola, cello, double bass. Each one is bigger than the last, and each one sounds lower. A violinist tucks it under the chin. A double bass player stands next to it.

The same rule runs through every family. Piccolo above flute. Trumpet above tuba. A small tight drum above a big loose one.

Brass players have a second trick as well. A trombone has a slide, and pushing it out makes the tube longer, which drops the note. Trumpets and horns use valves, which switch in extra loops of tubing to do the same job.

The piece written to show you all of them

In 1945 Benjamin Britten wrote The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, originally for a short educational film about the instruments.

He took one tune, borrowed from an older English composer called Henry Purcell, and played it first on the whole orchestra. Then the woodwind play it. Then the brass. Then the strings. Then the percussion. Then he goes through instrument by instrument, giving each one its own variation, before piling everybody back in at the end.

It is about seventeen minutes long and it is the fastest way to learn the sounds, because you hear the identical tune passed from voice to voice, so the only thing changing is the colour.

Build the four families at home

You can make one instrument from each family with things in the kitchen.

• Strings. Rubber bands round an empty tissue box. Pluck them. Different thicknesses give different pitches.
• Woodwind. Flatten the end of a paper straw, cut the flattened end into a narrow V with scissors, then put that end well inside your mouth and blow hard. It squawks like a tiny oboe, because you have made a reed. Snip the far end shorter while you blow and the note jumps up.
• Brass. Buzz your lips into your closed hands, or into a cardboard tube. That buzz is exactly what a trumpeter does, and it is the only part of a trumpet you cannot buy.
• Percussion. Rice or dried beans in a sealed jar for a shaker, an upturned saucepan for a drum, two spoons back to back for a clapper.

Why this matters: Once you have made a reed squawk with your own hands, an oboe stops being mysterious. It is a better made version of your straw.

The awkward ones

Two instruments cause arguments, and it is worth knowing why rather than memorising an answer.

The piano has strings inside it, and pressing a key throws a small hammer at them. So it is a string instrument that is played by hitting, which makes it percussion too. Most orchestras just call it a keyboard instrument and stop worrying.

The voice belongs to no family at all. It is the oldest instrument, everybody has one, and it is the subject of the next lesson.

Try it: name the family

Say which family before you read the answers.

1. Something you buzz your lips into.
2. A silver tube you blow across.
3. A wooden box with four strings and a bow.
4. A shiny gold instrument with a reed in the mouthpiece.
5. A big copper bowl with a skin stretched over it, hit with a soft stick.

Answers. One: brass, whatever it is made of. Two: woodwind, and this is the flute. Three: strings, a violin or a viola. Four: woodwind, and this is the saxophone catching people out. Five: percussion, and this is a timpani drum, the one that plays the hunters in Peter and the Wolf.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: the flute is brass because it is made of metal. Family is about how the sound is made. Air splitting on an edge is woodwind; lips buzzing is brass.
• Mistake: the biggest instrument is the loudest. A double bass is big because it is low. A piccolo is tiny and can be heard over the entire orchestra.
• Mistake: percussion just means drums. Anything struck, shaken or scraped counts: xylophone, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, and a jar of rice.
• Mistake: an orchestra plays whatever it likes. The families sit in fixed places, strings at the front and percussion at the back, so that the quiet instruments are not buried.

What to remember

• The four families are strings, woodwind, brass and percussion.
• They are grouped by how the sound is made, not by their material.
• Strings vibrate, woodwind splits air or wobbles a reed, brass buzzes lips, percussion gets hit or shaken.
• Inside every family, bigger means lower.
• Prokofiev gave every character in Peter and the Wolf an instrument in 1936, and Britten passed one tune round the whole orchestra in 1945.
• You can build one instrument from each family with a tissue box, a straw, your own lips and a jar of rice.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Peter and the Wolf. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Orchestra. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Dallas Symphony Orchestra. (n.d.). DSO Kids. Dallas Symphony Orchestra. dsokids.com
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Brass instrument. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A song from about 1250 that needs six people

In the British Library there is a manuscript, written in England around 1250, containing a song about summer arriving. Its name in the old spelling is Sumer is icumen in.

What makes it famous is the instruction written beside it. It is not for one singer. Four people sing the tune, each starting later than the one before, while two more hold a repeating pattern underneath.

Somebody worked out, nearly eight hundred years ago, that a tune could be built to fit on top of itself. That is what a round is, and you already know two or three of them.

Key idea: Some tunes are written so that any part of them fits with any other part, which is why several people can sing the same thing at different times and it sounds right.

Unison first

Before people can sing apart, they have to be able to sing together.

Unison means everybody singing exactly the same notes at the same time. It sounds like the easy option and it is not, because it requires everyone to match pitch, and matching pitch takes listening more than it takes talent.

Here is a two person exercise for it.

1. One person sings any comfortable note on the word doo, and holds it.
2. The other person slides their voice up or down slowly, like a siren, until the two notes lock together.
3. When they lock, the sound changes. It stops being two sounds and becomes one, and it gets a little smoother and stronger.
4. Swap over and do it again.

That moment of locking is the whole skill. Anyone who can hear it can learn to sing in tune.

How to sing so it comes out

Four things help immediately.

• Sit or stand tall. Slumped bodies have squashed lungs.
• Breathe low. Put a hand on your tummy. When you breathe in properly for singing, that hand moves out. If only your shoulders lift, the breath is too shallow.
• Open your mouth properly. More than feels normal. A closed mouth swallows the sound.
• Do not shout. Shouting is loud and flat and it hurts. Singing carries further than shouting with less effort, which choirs discover on the first day.

Remember: Loud is not the same as good. A soft voice that is in tune sounds better than a loud one that is not.

Call and response

The simplest way for a group to sing together is for one person to sing a line and everybody else to sing it back.

This is called call and response, and it turns up everywhere: in songs sung by sailors hauling ropes, in gospel churches, in army marching chants, in playground clapping games, in campfire songs where a leader sings a silly line and everyone repeats it.

It has one enormous advantage. Nobody has to know the song. The leader sings it and you copy, and by the third line you know it.

Try this now with somebody. Leader sings a short phrase on any words at all: my dog has fleas. Everyone repeats it exactly. Leader changes it: my dog has fleas, up in the trees. Everyone copies. Keep going and make it harder.

A round, step by step

A round, sometimes called a canon, is one tune sung by everybody, but each group starts at a different time.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat is the classic. Here is exactly how to run it with two people.

1. Both sing it through once together, in unison, so the tune is solid.
2. Person one starts alone: Row, row, row your boat.
3. When person one reaches gently down the stream, person two starts at the beginning.
4. Keep going. Person one finishes and immediately starts again, so that person two is never left alone.
5. Do it three times round, then stop wherever you both are.

The first attempt usually collapses, because it is very hard to hold your own line while a different line is happening in your ear. That collapse is normal and it is the whole exercise. The cure is to sing your own part slightly louder to yourself and not look at the other person.

Why this matters: Singing a round is the first time most people have to hold one idea steady while a different one is going on beside them, which is a real skill and not a musical trick.

Other rounds you probably know

• Frere Jacques. Four short phrases, each sung twice, which makes it the easiest round there is.
• London's Burning. Short, loud and very hard to get lost in.
• Three Blind Mice. Trickier, because the phrases are different lengths.

Frere Jacques is French. The first line means Brother James, and the song is about a monk who has slept through the time when he should have rung the morning bells. Nobody in England seems to know that, and everybody can sing it.

Why it fits

Here is the part that feels like magic and is not.

When you sing a round, you are hearing two different notes at once: yours and the other person's. Two or more notes sounding together are called harmony.

Some pairs of notes sound sweet together and some clash. A round is a tune specially built so that whichever notes end up sounding together, they are the sweet ones. Somebody had to design it that way. If you take any old tune and try to sing it as a round, it will sound terrible, and trying that once with a song like Happy Birthday is the best possible proof.

Try it: work these out

1. Two people sing the same notes at the same time. What is that called?
2. A leader sings a line and the group sings it back. What is that called?
3. In a two person round, when should the second person start?
4. Why does Happy Birthday sound bad as a round?

Answers. One: unison. Two: call and response. Three: at a fixed point in the tune, usually after the first phrase, and the same point every time round. Four: because it was not written to fit with itself, so the notes that land together clash.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: I cannot sing. Almost everybody can match a pitch once they have heard themselves lock onto it. There is a rare condition that makes it genuinely very hard, but it is much rarer than the number of people who say they have it.
• Mistake: singing louder makes it better. Shouting flattens the pitch and wrecks your throat. Tuning matters far more than volume.
• Mistake: any song works as a round. Rounds are built to fit on top of themselves. Most tunes are not, and it shows immediately.
• Mistake: in a round the second group sings a different tune. Everyone sings exactly the same tune. The only difference is when they start.

The short version

• Unison is everyone on the same notes, and matching pitch is the core skill.
• Sit tall, breathe low, open your mouth, and do not shout.
• Call and response lets a group sing a song nobody has learned yet.
• A round is one tune started at different times by different people.
• Rounds work because they are written so the notes that meet make harmony instead of a clash.
• People were writing rounds in England by about 1250.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Round (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Sumer is icumen in. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Frere Jacques. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Call and response (music). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A garden above the sea, 1867

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art there is a painting by Claude Monet called Garden at Sainte-Adresse. He made it in 1867 at a seaside town in northern France.

Here is what is in it. A stone terrace above the water. Beds of red and orange flowers in the front corner. Two people sitting in chairs with their backs to us, looking out. Two more standing at a fence. Two flagpoles with flags. And beyond the fence, the sea, with sailing boats and steamships going past.

Now here is a question worth more than all of that description. Is it windy?

You cannot feel wind in a painting. But look at the flags: they are stretched straight out sideways. So yes, it is windy, and you did not need anybody to tell you.

Key idea: Everything you can say about a picture has to come from something you can point at inside it.

Four steps for any picture

Museums are full of people who feel they should say something clever and cannot think of anything. Here is a method that always works, in four steps, in order.

1. Look. For thirty seconds, in silence. No talking, no reading the label.
2. Describe. Say only what is definitely there. Objects, colours, lines, where the light comes from, what is in front and what is behind.
3. Wonder. Ask questions. What is happening? What happened one minute before? What is just outside the edge?
4. Decide. Say what you think and feel, and then say what in the picture made you think it.

Step four is where most people start, and starting there is why they get stuck. Do the first three and the fourth arrives on its own.

The magic words

There are five words that turn any opinion into a good comment: because I can see.

• Weak: it looks cold.
• Strong: it looks cold, because I can see the sky is grey blue and the people are wearing coats and there are no leaves on the trees.
• Weak: I like it.
• Strong: I like it, because I can see the red flowers against the blue sea, and those are opposite colours, so the flowers jump out.

Notice what happened in that last one. That is exactly the colour idea from Module 2, used as evidence. Everything you have learned in this course is a tool for saying why.

Remember: Say what you think, then say what you can see that made you think it.

Working through the Monet

Here is the method actually applied, so you can hear what it sounds like.

Describe. The bottom third is a garden with flowers in the corner. The middle is a fence and people. The top is sea and sky, with boats. The colours are mostly bright: red, orange, green, blue. The light seems to come from high up and slightly behind us, because the shadows fall towards us and are short.

Wonder. Who are the people? They have their backs to us, so we cannot see their faces. Are the two sitting down talking to each other, or watching the ships? Where are the ships going? It seems to be a warm afternoon and nobody is in a hurry.

Decide. It feels calm and rich and slightly stiff, like a photograph of a family holiday where everyone is behaving. I think that because nobody is moving, everybody is neatly dressed, and the flowers are in tidy beds rather than growing wild.

None of that required knowing anything about Monet. It required looking.

Two more things worth noticing

Where has the artist put you? In the Monet you are standing above the terrace, looking down slightly. In Hokusai's Great Wave you are down in the water with the boats, which is much more frightening than looking down from a cliff would be. The artist chose where to put you, and that choice does half the work.

Where does your eye go first, and why? Usually it is the brightest thing, the biggest thing, or a face. Artists arrange pictures to control this, and the arrangement has a name: composition.

The same four steps for music

Listening works exactly the same way, with the describe step adjusted for sound.

1. Listen. All the way through, once, without talking.
2. Describe. Fast or slow? Loud or soft, or does it change? High or low? Which instrument families can you hear? Is there a steady beat you could walk to? Does anything repeat?
3. Wonder. If this were a film, what would be happening on screen? Who is moving, and how?
4. Decide. Did you like it, and which of the things you described made you feel that?

Every word in step two came from Module 4. That module was the vocabulary, and this is what it was for.

A piece to practise on

In 1886 Camille Saint-Saens wrote The Carnival of the Animals, fourteen short pieces, each about an animal. It is close to perfect for this exercise because each piece is only a minute or two long.

• The Elephant. The tune is played by the double bass, the biggest, lowest string instrument, and it is a waltz. A heavy animal dancing in threes.
• Aquarium. High rippling notes, soft and shimmering, moving up and down like light through water.
• Fossils. A xylophone, dry and rattling, which is a very good joke about old bones.
• The Swan. A cello, slow and smooth, over rippling piano. The cello line glides while the piano makes the water underneath.

Notice that Saint-Saens is doing exactly what you have been learning. He picks the instrument for its voice, the tempo for the animal's speed, and the pitch for its size. Low and slow for an elephant. High and quick for a fish tank.

Why this matters: Composers make the same kinds of choices painters do. Once you know the choices, you can hear them being made.

Liking, disliking, and being wrong

You are allowed to dislike a famous painting or a famous piece of music. Plenty of people do.

What you are not allowed to do is stop at I do not like it. Finish the sentence. I do not like it because the colours are all muddy browns and there is nothing bright to look at. Now that is a real opinion, and someone can disagree with it properly.

There is one way to be wrong, though: saying something the picture does not show. If you say the man is running and the man is clearly sitting down, that is not an opinion, it is a mistake, and looking again will fix it.

Try it: strong or weak?

Which of these comments would count as strong, and why?

1. This painting is nice.
2. It feels windy, because the flags are stretched out straight and the sea has little white tops on the waves.
3. This music is fast.
4. This music sounds like something creeping up on you, because it is quiet and low and it keeps getting a bit faster.

Answers. One is weak: nice says nothing and points at nothing. Two is strong: a feeling plus two pieces of evidence. Three is a description, so it is a good start but it stops too early; add what the speed does. Four is strong: a feeling plus three things you could check by listening again.

Common misconceptions

• Mistake: you need to know the artist and the date to say anything. Everything in the four steps comes from the picture itself. The label is interesting afterwards.
• Mistake: there is a right answer that the museum knows. There are wrong answers, which are the ones the picture contradicts. Beyond that, evidence is what makes an answer good.
• Mistake: if you dislike a famous work you are wrong. Disliking it with a reason is a real response. Only I do not like it with no reason is a dead end.
• Mistake: the title explains the picture. Some titles were added later by other people, and some are jokes. Look first and read the label second.

What to carry forward

• Look, describe, wonder, decide, in that order, for a picture or a piece of music.
• Finish every opinion with because I can see, or because I can hear.
• Notice where the artist has put you and where your eye goes first.
• For music, describe speed, volume, pitch, instruments, beat and repeats before deciding anything.
• Saint-Saens matched instrument, speed and pitch to each animal in 1886, and you can hear him doing it.
• Disliking something is fine. Not being able to say why is the only real problem.

Sources

1. Claude Monet. (1867). Garden at Sainte-Adresse. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. metmuseum.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). The Carnival of the Animals. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Tate. (n.d.). Composition. Tate Art Terms. tate.org.uk
4. Tate Kids. (n.d.). Explore artists. Tate. tate.org.uk