Professor of Biology gives life to the classic Etch a Sketch by thinking outside the box to express artistic passion

 Remember Etch a Sketch, the infamous childhood toy with a bulky red plastic frame with two white knobs where you can create any image that you’d like?

While many of us may only take interest in them for a short time before they are tucked away in the depths of our closets, some have found that it is a whole landscape for artistic creations.

One such person is Colby’s very own Andrea Tilden, who has been a professor of biology for the past 22 years. While this may seem like an odd undertaking for a biology professor, Tilden is no stranger to the arts. 

“I have been involved in art all my life,” Tilden said. “Even as a little kid I was taking art lessons with lots of local Maine artists. There are a lot of artists around the Mount Desert Island area who have settled there, so I’m extraordinarily lucky to have them around me and learn from them, everything from painting to photography to illustrating and other kinds of things. So that’s always been a part of my life.”

It has always been a struggle for Tilden to balance art in her life due to her multiple passions. 

“I was actually an art major in college, but then I became a double art and biology major and I ended up just veering to biology, but I have always been torn between the two,” she explained. “I have an equal love for both of them and it’s often a fight for the art to make its way to the surface.”

Tilden’s love for biology even comes though in her artworks. 

“A lot of my work is of human form, and that is something that has always been a theme in my art since the very beginning so that part was very natural to me,” Tilden said.

However, she never expected an Etch a Sketch to become one of her main art forms to express herself. 

“So a spare moment during my sabbatical, around Christmas time of 2010 is what led to the serendipitous accident that I took up Etch a Sketch,” Tilden explained.

“I had bought my then five year old son an Etch a Sketch for Christmas, and it’s one of those toys that everyone has as a kid, especially in my generation. It is one of those frustrating things where you would try to draw stairs and letters and things but never do much else with it, me included, as a kid.

“Then there was a storm and the power went out for a while and the internet and cable was down so there wasn’t a whole lot to do, so I sat down and played around with it and created a super ugly mermaid,” Tilden continued.

“I realized that I could do better and created a super ugly Mona Lisa which I posted on Facebook and got loads of super positive feedback.”

To create an entire piece, it takes around a couple of weeks excluding the preservation process, which is also time-consuming.

In fact, the preservation process doesn’t guarantee that all the pieces make it unscathed. 

“Everything that takes place on the Etch a Sketch has got to stay, even the mistakes. Sometimes you can see that some of the lines are not that perfect or the glass that goes over the top cracks, but I just have to accept these imperfects as part of the art,” Tilden said.

Despite the labor-intensive process, it is something that has become a tranquil exercise for Tilden.

“Had I known how much work goes into producing one of these, I may have never actually gotten into it, but it is such a satisfying process,” she said. 

“It is very mindless to make the little knob go back and forth. It is very meditative as I have to tune my brain out and just focus on the one task at hand.” 

Tilden has even found a community of Etch a Sketch artists.

“There are some fantastic people whom I am in a Facebook group with, where everyone posts their different Etch a Sketch creations. Some people even do this professionally,” Tilden noted.

“There are no two people doing the same thing; it’s quite extraordinary.” 

Tilden hopes to stay in Maine after the end of her teaching career and really hone in on her artistic endeavors.

“I have shown and sold my pieces at various different shows and places so it really is a different world for me. I am actually actively planning and setting up a studio. I also do various paintings in such so I am very interested in launching my art career once I retire.”

~ Tanvi Iyer `23