Drawing on the Left Side of the Television
by Bryce Martin

Jon Nagy really did want you to learn how to draw.

I knew how to draw, I just wanted to get better at it. Nagy had a television show in the late 1950s where you could draw along with him.

Literally.

You placed a transparent sheet of plastic of some sort over the TV screen and, as he suggested, you then drew over the lines he had just drawn. I did the tracing with a grease pencil. It worked fairly well, but thin lines were out of the question. I got the transparent whatever it was from a cousin who had at one time the entire set. Nagy had some kind of drawing kit you could purchase where games such as Monopoly were sold.

The artist was a beatnik, or he at least looked like a beatnik. That look, with the goatee, was in vogue in some circles. The most mainstream example was actor Bob Denver as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. By the time Gilligan's Island rolled around, Denver, as Gilligan, was old hat to us TV veterans.

The method was no use to me at all. First, though it held fairly well to the screen on its own, I still had to press down on a top corner with my left hand to hold the sheet firmly in place. Second, it was way too basic. As I said, I already knew how to draw and this was a step backwards. I had learned on my own that the drawing surface, the material being used to draw on -- even different types of paper -- mattered. The drawing utensil was a huge factor. A fine, sharpened pencil, for example, delivered a different effect than a rounded, worn one.

My Nagy drawing aid quickly ended up with another sheet of TV screen plastic, in File 13 with the tri-color sheet used to simulate color television. That one had green on the lower third, then brown and then blue. You stuck it on your black and white TV screen and on some westerns you'd hit upon a scene where it actually seemed to serve its purpose. Fortunately, or not, westerns made up most of television programming then.

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