Part of my fascination/obsession with searching for random long lost items from my memory came in part from the fact that I often doubt my own childhood memories. I had/have a slightly overactive imagination and am sometimes confused about the difference between my own mental creations and real life. My plan is to write up brief explanations of what I was looking up and if there was a reason, why. And then to actually present the results of my search for anyone who might be interested in what I found. For the search, I'll first post what my search terms were in google (which I use for pretty much all of my searching needs) and then links to what I found from the search.
Enjoy!
The search
Last night I randomly remembered a show I watched on television as a child. It was a show about drawing by a man whom I remembered as donning the persona of an astronaut and who drew pictures of little alien lifeforms to teach us children about things like foreshortening and shading - the two things I remember clearest about the show. After mentioning the show to a few folks, none of whom had ever heard of it or watched it, I decided to go on a search to confirm that the show had in fact existed as I remembered it. I also realized that while I remembered the term foreshortening from the show, I wasn't completely sure what it meant. My impression was that it had something to do with perspective and the fact that things in the front of pictures are larger than the things in the back of pictures, but this didn't seem to fit with the term fore (the front) shortening (making smaller), so making things smaller in the front...? This too would have to be clarified via search.
The google search
The first search terms: alien drawing tv program for kids
Result:
*From this page I got my question answered!
The find:
This was exactly what I was looking for. And the best part was that the first show I found on a video search had him talking about foreshortened circles in the first minute!! The show was "the secret city" by a guy named Mark Kistler, called commander Mark on the show.
Here's a youtube link to an episode of "the secret city" for those of you who want to see if you also might have watched this show in the 80s:
Here's what Mark Kistler is currently working on, he still does shows teaching kids how to draw on public television:
As for foreshortening, I wasn't too far off, perspective is part of it, and he definitely uses the word a lot:
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