John Obringer didn’t really enjoy other forms of art – like drawing or coloring – as a kid. But he loved his Etch A Sketch, and spent a lot of time perfecting his sketching on the shake-to-erase mechanical toy during long car trips.
“We did a lot of long car rides visiting family that live far away, and this was before most kids had Game Boys or any sort of video games or TVs in the car,” he said. “So, my parents bought me an Etch A Sketch, and I figured out pretty early on that I could draw on that better than most people. I just was able to kind of control the patterns on it better.”
Obringer used it to sketch classic rock band logos, but the habit faded around the time he was in middle school. This past summer, though, he rediscovered his love for Etch A Sketch art when he moved into a new house.
“I thought, ‘I haven’t seen this in a long time, I wonder what I could draw?’ I was just looking around at what kind of things might be easy to draw. So, I did the Philly LOVE sign, and I drew it because that’s very angular, and I thought it wouldn’t be that hard to do. I drew that, and then I did like a little Philly skyline next to it, and I thought, ‘Actually, that turned out better than I thought it would.’ So, I decided I would try drawing some other Philly-related things.”
Obringer, a teacher in East Falls, said he has developed a passion for creating these Philly-centric art pieces, and has begun sharing them.
A unique combination
Obringer’s designs gained traction with a wider audience after his wife posted them on Facebook. Requests began coming in from people interested in buying his work.
“I would draw more logos and sell them, and I’ve just been selling to people casually who have messaged me and asked, ‘Hey, can I get this as a gift for my husband or a gift for my parents, or whoever?’ I’ve been making birthday gifts for people. And businesses have reached out about drawing some logos for them, or drawing the front of their building.”
Obringer said he’s happy to cater to requests, and enjoys seeing others appreciate the uniqueness of the Etch A Sketch pieces he is creating.
“It’s just been cool sharing my drawings with people and being able to have a creative design that you can’t really recreate any other way,” he said.
Individual sketches can require a lot of work. Creating an Eagles helmet sketch, one of the hardest designs he’s undertaken, took “about 10 hours,” he said.
“I thought it turned out really cool,” he said. “But, I spent a long time making it really good. The slower you move, the smoother you can make it, and the more detail you can put into it.”
Obringer has developed a process to minimize errors, and starts from the hardest part of the drawing.
“When I do the normal Eagles logo, I always just start with the beak of the eagle, because that’s the part that sometimes may take me six or seven tries, and I just have to keep erasing it,” he said. “So I start with that and then once I get that done, then I go to the next-hardest part, and then I kind of work my way through the easier stuff.”
That helps to avoid big mistakes later in a project, after he has put in a lot of time. He said he can usually fix minor mishaps with shading at the end of the drawing.
The most difficult part of the process, Obringer said, is disassembling the Etch A Sketch so that the art doesn’t disappear when shaken.
“You really have to cut it open, so I just get a knife and I cut open the Etch A Sketch,” he said. “Then there’s what I think is an aluminum powder on the inside, and I take a shop vac and I vacuum all that out. Then, I take the ‘etch’ part and I disassemble that too. And then, when I glue it back together, you can turn the knobs and you can shake it and nothing will disappear.”
Obringer says he couldn’t do it without his wife Morganne.
“She made the initial post and she’s been the one who’s been really fielding all of the orders, so she actually is the one keeping a list of everything and talking to everybody about what kind of orders that they wanna do,” he said.
To learn more, or to commission your own Etch A Sketch piece, head over to John’s Instagram page.
