Hey kids, here's a secret: Sometimes Mark Kistler just pretends to draw.

Most adults will have no idea who Kistler is, but most children know him as the artist who is the star of "Imagination Station," the lively how-to-draw TV show on PBS.

Today, in a sound stage at KNME-Channel 5, Kistler completes 11 days of taping 40 new half-hour shows to be distributed to other PBS stations around the country.

KNME has been airing Kistler's old shows at 1:30 pm weekdays - not always convenient for a schoolchild's schedule, and so some parents of his young fans habitually tape them.

For those who've never seen the show, a word picture: Kistler, 35, sits at a tilt-table easel. Sometimes he talks, with lots of illustrative hand gestures, directly into the camera. Sometimes another camera peers over his left shoulder to show his right hand at work on a drawing. He works primarily in cartoon mode, and words - he calls them renaissance words - appear on the screen to accompany his ongoing oral explanation of what he's doing.

"Shading," is one of those words. Others: shadow, foreshortening and size. These segments with the camera on him or on his artwork are interspersed with brief animated and other pre-produced bits, including "Masters Gallery," featuring art from museums, and "Student Gallery," with art sent in by young viewers.

Kistler is constantly upbeat and encouraging to his young viewers. He urges them to feel the joy of "pencil power." He tells them to practice, practice, practice their drawing skills - nine hours of practice after school each night would be just right, he said. He also tries to show them "how to fall into the paper" while experiencing "art attacks." And he often gives his cheerful thumbs-up signal to his legions of "little drawing dumplings."

And there are lots of them. Kistler has been doing how-to-art shows for children for about 18 years. His "Imagination Station" is seen on about 200 PBS stations. He has received more than a million letters, and 700,000 e-mail messages, from viewers.

Kistler says he sees what he's doing as providing useful skills and wholesome enjoyment to children - "it's an alternative to all the violence they see on TV," Viewed on television at home, the show zips right along. But in the studio, even when they're being produced at the rate of up to four a day, there are frequent pauses in the action.

During one such pause during the taping of one of the shows Monday - it featured Kistler showing children how to draw a character called "Maniac Mouse" straddling a pencil rocketing across the drawing surface - the production crew asked Kistler to tape a bunch of brief shots, to be mixed in later, of himself holding pencils and various other tools of his trade.

"Pretend to draw," said Linda Griffis, Kistler's floor director and assistant producer, who was on the set but just outside the camera's frame. Kistler did so. His thick, black mustache quivered with the apparent strain of holding back from actually adding anything to his drawing.

"OK, now really draw," Griffis said, and he was instantly adding details to maniac Mouse. Characters featured in other Kistler shows taped at KNME include Jurassic Jogger, Intergalactic Iguana, leaping Lady Bugs and the Kayak Kid. As he drew Maniac Mouse, Kistler was accompanied on keyboard and accordion by Dan Cantrell, the show's music director - the job is a new addition for this run of shows.

Others in the production crew on the set or in the control room were camerman Manuel Machuch, David Romero and Mark Farquhar, computer and graphics specialist Jill Langham, video controller Eric Mathes, technical director Randy Lantz and sound engineer Cindy Trissel, all of KNME.

Kistler's own production crew, in addition to Griffis, were producer Rob Neustadt, director Douglas DeVore and "Web Wizard" Dennis Dawson. All of these folks volunteered their time to fly in from other jobs in other parts of the country to help put the show together.

Kistler, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., earns most of his living from more than 200 personal appearances each year at schools and by giving art workshops for children. He doesn't charge PBS stations to use his shows.

Kistler first connected with KNME when he visited Albuquerque about two years ago for an appearance at S.Y. Jackson Elementary School in the Northeast Heights. He'd been invited there by Julie Loeb, a parent whose son William, then 7 years old, was (and remains) a major Kistler fan.

As production of the "Maniac Mouse" installment of "Imagination Station" proceeded Monday, Maryann Colandrea, who is Kistler's director of viewer support, sat in the control room sketching right along with him. "If you watch his shows, you will start drawing," she said, adding shadows to her nearly identical rendition of the cartoon mouse ont the rocketing pencil. "It's impossible to resist."