I drew a picture of astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to celebrate. NASA’s 60th anniversary was in 2018 and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing was last year, but earlier this year we also witnessed an important date in space exploration: the successful launch of SpaceX’s first crewed mission. The knobs are moon-shaped: rounded domes with craters. The NASA edition has a black frame, printed with an image showing NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on the left, and an astronaut on the right, with a starry expanse across the top and bottom. My drawing of Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, the first SpaceX astronauts, on a NASA-themed Etch A Sketch. They sent me two of them to try out: the NASA edition and the Diamond Anniversary edition. This year, to celebrate the anniversary, Spin Master (who acquired Etch A Sketch in 2016) has created several special limited editions. I’ve since made some permanent Etch A Sketch drawings, and I’ve also done drawings during Inktober that I called my Etchtober series. I rediscovered the toy during college, when I discovered I had a knack for drawing on them, and it’s been my silly party trick ever since. I particularly liked drawing what I called “mazes”: space-filling patterns made entirely of horizontal and vertical lines. I grew up playing with Etch A Sketches, though I can’t remember if I ever owned one myself as a kid. Combine the two knobs, and you could draw anything (in one continuous line, of course)! That was easier said than done, of course, and many of us grew up drawing variations of stairs and boxes before turning the Etch A Sketch over and shaking it up to erase it. The concept was simple: one knob moved the stylus left and right, and the other knob moved the stylus up and down. 60 years ago this month, the Ohio Art Company introduced the world to the Etch A Sketch, a remarkable (and sometimes remarkably frustrating) drawing toy.
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