To prevent her art from being erased or drawn over, Tilden disassembles each Etch a Sketch, removes the drawing mechanism and carefully vacuums out the plastic beads. As the stylus moves, it scrapes the dust off the glass, producing dark lines that create the drawing. The Etch A Sketch’s knobs control a stylus on a pulley system. When you shake it up and down, tiny plastic beads deposit this dust on the glass. The glass plate of an Etch A Sketch is coated with sticky aluminum dust. To do so requires an understanding of how the toy works.
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“I kept improving and I figured out how to get dimensionality and form and shading into my image,” Tilden explained.Īs her work improved, she wanted to preserve it. He was more interested in Legos, so Tilden began experimenting with the drawing toy.Īfter a few frustrating early starts, she was hooked. She first ventured into Etch A Sketch art in 2010, after purchasing the toy to entertain her young son during a snow storm. “Other than some basic outline lines, everything is a horizontal or vertical line,” Tilden said. I work millimeter-by-millimeter, achieving different levels of shading by varying the distance between lines and by retracing multiple times over small regions.”
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The works are therefore full of imperfections that can be seen on close inspection. “Every line is permanent there is no erasing or reconfiguration. “The inability to lift and move the stylus requires that I be both highly controlled and tolerant of chaos,” Tilden wrote in a blog post about her art. She is constrained by both the size of the Etch A Sketch (the screen is 6.25 by 4.5 inches) and the fact that the entire piece must be composed of a single continuous line. She can spend an hour on the shading of a tiny quadrant and up to 70 hours per piece. Once an Etch A Sketch design is laid out, the actual execution can be almost “mindless,” Tilden said.
![etch a sketch art etch a sketch art](https://live.staticflickr.com/3076/2572220292_6b09c8fb2c_b.jpg)
Her art, while also meticulous, can feel relaxing in contrast. Her scientific work involves analyzing large sets of data. “I’m the type of person who can sit and focus on one thing for a very long time,” she said. Tilden, who lives in Waterville, draws parallels between her professional and artistic pursuits. Coffman in his research into the effect of early exposure to the stress hormone cortisol on zebrafish embryos. She is collaborating with biologist James A.
![etch a sketch art etch a sketch art](https://i.huffpost.com/gen/1240256/thumbs/o-SLIDE-13-570.jpg)
Currently on sabbatical from her teaching job at Colby College, she is working as a visiting professor at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor. By day, the Ellsworth native works as a computational biologist.