What I Learned from Making 50 Sketches of an Oil Lamp
I am no stranger to spending a lot of time thinking about one object and approaching it in different ways. When I took photography classes in high school, I would sit and shoot frame after frame of the same still life or object.
I still do that now with my iPhone, with a notable instance being on a photo walk with Laurie Klein back in 2013. I happened upon a birdhouse sitting on the ground and proceeded to take a series of photographs using both my DSLR and the Hipstamatic app on my phone.
Experimenting with mood and light in my post-production flow created interesting effects that changed the mood of the piece. I ended up posting two photos to Instagram following the shoot:
Even before that, I would study the same object using a variety of media to render a subject.
As part of a larger portraiture study, I asked some friends to send me photos to draw from. For one photo, I drew three versions: oil pastel, watercolor, and a combination of the two. Had I not pushed, I wouldn’t have gotten the third result which I liked better.
So when it came to picking my object I wanted to find something that had enough visual interest that I would be able to come at it several ways.
I decided on an oil lamp.
This old oil lamp has a strong enough presence. in my life that it once sent my family on a trip to Cape Cod in the mid-aughts to replace the broken glass shaft.
That event alone was so traumatizing that when my dad saw me sitting with it at the table he asked me what was wrong with the oil lamp.
This interested me because it was not only an intricate and dynamic object but it was also an object that when I looked at it, I seemed to find more details beyond its initial shape.
So I sat with the oil lamp and I drew it fifty times.
When I approached this assignment, I was heavily influenced by this LitHub article by Anna Cox where she describes the process of photographing a dumb paper bag. I knew I had to go into this, not hoping to render the lamp perfectly but looking at what the process could teach me.
So I took this as a chance to study the media available to me and see how I could better utilize them in future work.
Stage 1: Graphite Pencil Studies
Using a standard #2 pencil I sat with the lamp and made a series of eleven sketches that focus on different parts of the lamp and different angles of the lamp.
Drawing 1: Side view in pencil
Drawing 2: Top view
Drawing 3: Close up of top-edge beading
Drawing 4: Ignition side-view
Drawing 5: Close up of the oil tank and wick
Drawing 6: Close up of the glass
Drawing 7: Close up of the base with scallop detail.
Stage 2: Still Pencils, Different Consistency
For my next set of drawings, I changed my medium to a General’s Graphite Layout Pencil. This allowed for darker lines and gave me a little more freedom to play with shading.
Drawing 8: Sideview/Close-up
Drawing 9: Top detail viewed at a slightly different angle
Drawing 10: Close up of clamping mechanism with no glass
Drawing 11: Base close-up with focus on the handle
Stage 3: Random Materials in the Pencil Pouch
Then I started to play with different media. Over the years I’ve acquired quite a few colored pencil sets, some brush pens, and an assortment of oddities from a one-year Art Snacks subscription. I decided that the rest of my drawings would be a chance to see how these materials behaved and what they intended to be used for.
For these two I worked with two different styles of brush pens. These allowed for both strokes with varying intensity. I found that I preferred the brown one as opposed to the red one, mostly because it allowed me to get definitive lines.
Drawing 12: Sideview made with a Micron Brush Pen in red.
Drawing 13: Close up of the class, attempts to study planes and shapes for slopes
Drawing 14: Close up of the metal segment that ignites the oil.
On my next page, I started playing with some of the one-off media that I had. I started with a Winsor-Newton Promarker which had a dual tip and allowed for anything from thick to thin lines. Then I added another paint marker with a slightly metallic feel, a 2B charcoal pencil, and a Tombow colored pencil.
Since a lot of my media was chunky this page lent itself to shape studies and bold lines very well. I particularly liked the curvature I was able to achieve in Drawing 17 using the paint marker. However, my favorite medium on this page was the Tombow colored pencil.
Drawing 15: Glass shape/light/form study in marker
Drawing 16: Glass texture study in 2B charcoal pencil
Drawing 17: Oil lamp form, close up
Drawing 18: Ignitor study in colored pencil
I ended up liking the red colored pencil so much that I did a whole page full of drawings with it. I found that it was sort enough to respond to pressure and lay down a solid black of color.
I ended up drawing the ignitor and clamps with glass for content and then studying the bottom half of the oil lamp, recording all the different planes.
Last but not least for this page, I did a side view.
Drawing 19: Ignitor and clamps with glass
Drawing 20: Oil tank and stand
Drawing 21: Sideview
Stage 4: Get Geometric with It
After studying this oil lamp quite a bit I was ready to branch off and have some fun with it. So I started going back to this idea of planes and drew from some of my previous artistic influence in cubism to do a series of quick sketches that explored the lamp in geometric forms.
I did these in an Ironiak Marker, which was again a dual-tip marker that was completely new to me and I wasn’t sure how it would behave.
Drawing 22: Marker drawing with a curvy top and a geometric/angled base for the rest.
Drawing 23: Study of the glass shaft with quadrilaterals as different planes.
Drawing 24: Study of the glass shaft as a series of circles stacked on top of each other.
Stage 5: Pushing the Limits
I have a set of Tombow markers. These markers are dual-ended and have an end for long calligraphy-like brush strokes and a side for finer detailed work. I decided to see how the two ends could be applied in sketching and I found that the finer end worked well.
Drawing 25: Ignition mechanism
Drawing 26: Extreme close up of base detail
Drawing 27: Top detail
Drawing 28: Base
Drawing 29: Base and oil reservoir line/material study
Drawing 30: Glass contour
Stage 6: Curvature, and Textures
I went back to experimenting with some new media that doesn’t tend to get a lot of play. In this case, I had a Liquitex Paint Pen and a LePen permanent marker.
What I realized later was that this set of renderings was perfect for studying curve and texture within the lamp.
I found the Liquitex paint pen to be harder to control and get a result that I liked especially with this subject. That’s part of why so much of this one rendering was filled in.
In contrast, the LePen Permanent Marker was perfect for trying to create texture.
Drawing 31: Baselayers in Liquitex paint pen
Drawing 32: Sideview in LePen Permanent
Drawing 33: Straight-on view of the top detail
Drawing 34: Wick juncture/attachment
Stage 7: Realizing My Own Biases
Like most humans, I am a creature of habit, and since I was trying to push myself to think outside the box, I tried to make note of the materials that I was inclined to pick up.
Many of the sketching utensils I was gravitating towards were brush pens and I tended to go for that implement. If it was a dual brush pen I tended to ignore the smaller end.
I also remembered how much I hated blind contour drawing in high school art class, so I decided to force myself to sit through it. To my surprise, I ended up being quite happy with the result of my blind contour.
Drawing 35: Micron brush pen side view with no details, external layers only
Drawing 36: 3-minute timed blind contour drawing with LePen Permanent
Drawing 37: 2-minute timed drawing in continuous-line blind drawing structure in Prismacolor pencil
Drawing 38:Returned to Winsor-Newton marker using the fine point end in a gesture drawing.
Stage 8: Hearing My Art Teacher’s Voice in My Head
At this point, I started to remember an art teacher telling me that each time you drew something you got better at it. I tried to push myself beyond a basic shape and to study parts of the lamp in more detail. It was then that I started to notice the texture around the ring, the coloration of the liquid, and how it changed depending on light refraction.
On this page, I also introduced a regular fine-line LePen in Pink and a Micron pen in conjunction with the brush-tip of a Tombow marker.
Drawing 39: Fine-line drawing of the ignitor
Drawing 40: Top detail viewed from the bottom in LePen
Drawing 41: Sideview in polygons with Tombow Colored Pencil
Drawing 42: Geometric base refinement
Drawing 43: Handle study with LePen and Micron
Drawing 44: Sideview in micron and Tombow brush pen
Stage 9: Breaking It Down Again
At this point, I realized there were a couple of views I had not sketched of the oil lamp, or at least hadn’t tried in another media.
I tried the top-view again in a Micron pen but realized that time was my friend here because looking down the barrel of that oil lamp was not a good idea. So I recorded my gesture drawing and made note of different circles and plane shifts. It’s not to scale but it gives enough of an idea.
Then I also realized I hadn’t drawn one of the things that had attracted me to the lamp in the first place — its basic outline. I attempted to draw a version that had minimal detail and created an outline.
Then I topped it off once more with a few more technical drawings, realizing that there were little details to this lamp I was missing such as metal tabs and tiny metal hinges.
Drawing 45: Basic shape/outline
Drawing 46: Top view in Micron
Drawing 47: Technical drawing of the ignitor mechanism
Drawing 48: Base detail/technical sketch with attempts to show depth and thickness.
Stage 10: Get So Into It You Don’t Realize You Did An Additional Sketch
This may have been the slight fumes given off by the oil in the reservoir, but I miscounted, and so my last page has three drawings instead of two.
One of the things I had been trying to capture was the striation in the glass. It’s barely perceivable unless you are up close but there are these gorgeous lines that were so hard to draw.
I also had one final media I wanted to try out, a Uniball Posca paint marker that was much thinner than my Liquitex, and I wanted to take a moment and separate the glass from the lamp itself.
At this moment, I realized that I had essentially been drawing two objects the entire time. They just had a distinct relationship with each other that I didn’t make sense apart.
Drawing 49: Sideview sketch in Uniball Posca
Drawing 50: Close up of glass texture in Spectra Marker and Micron
Drawing 51: Micron drawing of the “lamp” without the glass.
So, What Was the Point of These Pages
Looking back at these pages of sketches, I realized a few vital things about myself as a sketcher and designer:
- I move faster when I am working with fine point markers
- The more I draw something the more details I see
- My object correlation in regards to things that are instinctively a pair is strong.
If I were to do more sketches, I would like to play around with collage and see what materials give me the shape and texture of the glass. Glass is such a hard thing to render and in a sketching phase, I was trying not to dig out and do complex light and shadow studies.
I would also like to try watercolors and paints to see how they might further enhance the finished product.
