Artist Trent Call spent Thursday afternoon at the Utah Arts Festival marveling at the sight of people carrying vibrantly colored programs and other festival paraphernalia. After all, the 29-year-old supplied the logo and design for this year's festival program, and his artwork appeared to be everywhere.

Sitting in his canopied booth hawking custom T-shirts, books and stickers, Call also kept his eye on the clouds. "Between slinging goods, I'm trying not to get nervous about the wind," Call said.

Intermittent strong winds and the threat of rain brought turbulent moments to the Utah Arts Festival's opening afternoon, prompting many of the event's nearly 140 artists to wonder about the aerodynamic stability of tents housing their wares.

Yet the festival's pulse didn't seem to miss a beat, especially to those attracted to the rhythms of the Urban Arts section, located north of The Leonardo in Library Square. The gravitational pull attracted groups of teens to The Cube, a four-sided, ever-morphing work of graffiti art. Thanks to the hissing and fumes of as many as three cans of spray paint at the same time, the changing artwork boasted visuals, as well as sound and scent.

"With all the other booths here, you have to ask the artist about their techniques," said Devin Olguin, 15, a student at St. Joseph's Catholic High School. "Here, they're doing it right in front of you."

Older attendees knew as much, too. "I came over here because I want to see it all," said a 78-year-old retiree who would only offer his first name, Ed.

Many of the artists spraying away at The Cube with stencil and can in hand didn't want to talk, much less be photographed.

"I'm not surprised," said Mason Fetzer, a 27-year-old artist and associate with Higher Learning, an arts education program emphasizing intellectual creativity. "If they've done anything out in the field, it's doubtful they'd want their picture shown."

Graffiti can be a strong gateway attracting youths to visual art, thanks to its roots as an urban art form. And unlike conventional painting, it requires more space.

Yet many teenagers have learned skills such as line theory, color theory and value scale through wielding cans of spray paint. "If you tried doing that through a watercolor class, it would be really hard to get 20 kids to sign up," Fetzer said.

Across the road at Washington Square, Summerhays Music Center's gallery of musical instruments for sampling had no trouble drawing the 10-and-under crowd to the Target-sponsored art yard. Keeping the proceedings sanitary in the H1N1-era was center employee Bruce Woodward, who estimated he'd cleaned a handful of brass instrument mouthpieces 350 times and changed 20 clarinet and saxophone reeds between noon and 4 p.m.

"It's great fun," Woodward said. "The parents get into it, too -- cheering their children on."

Brandee Lloyd, a paralegal who brought Colin, her 6-year-old son, to the Summerhays booth to blow on a trumpet, said she's learned one rule over her years of Utah Arts Festival attendance: "You have to come on the first day, otherwise all the kids' stuff is picked over."