A tutorial by High Elf
The tutorial is addressed to a beginner in modelling with Blender.
In this tutorial I will guide you on your way to making your own carryable lamp.
The materials in this tutorials are 100% based on what has worked for me.

The tools you will need to follow the tutorial:
Oblivion
Blender
Blender Nif Scripts
Photoshop
Nvidia *.dds plugin
Nifskope
TES CS

The skills that you should have by the starting this tutorial:
Navigating in Blender, knowledge of basic tools
A very basic knowledge of Photoshop
Some ease in Navigating in TES CS
Being comfortable with getting around Nifskope

Ok, let us start!

Modelling the mesh for your portable light
· Open up your Blender.
· Press 1 on your Num Pad, then Spacebar.
· On a dropdown menu choose Add->Mesh->Cylinder.
· Then specify the characteristics of the cylinder you want. The size at the moment does not matter, but the number of vertices is important. If you want your model to be low in polygon count, and still look good, choose around 36 vertices for your cylinder. It is somewhat important in this case to keep the number of vertices even.

· Press 7 on Num Pad. In the intersection of the axes is the place where there would be a handle of your new light. Make sure that you are looking from above on your cylinder.

· Press B, select the lower end of you cylinder. The other end must not be selected. By using G key, extend the mesh down along y axis. Extend the other end, too. The size does not matter at this point, but the proportions do. Take a look at the next picture to see what roughly you should get.

· Extrude (E key) the lower end of the mesh for about 1/10 of the whole cylinder length in the Y direction. You can make selection of multiple vertices by simply pressing B key, and dragging the selection window above the vertices. Then scale this edge up by pressing S key. Repeat the extrusions and scalings to this end until you will get something that resembles this:
· If you cylinder is open-ended, there's a way to fix this: do one more extrusion to the lowest vertices, along y axis. Make sure that you hold down Ctrl key, and remember the number of "jumps" your selection makes as you move your cursor down. Then press Alt+M key, merge the vertices at center. Without zooming in or out, move the new vertex up along Y axis, holding Ctrl key, for the number of "jumps" that you remember from the previous step.
You will end up with the result that looks like this:

· Now, when you are familiar with this simple technique of making symmetric you can unleash you fantasy (but don't let it go too far). I applied extrusions and scaling to the other end of our original cylinder, and got what you can see in the next picture. Your mesh does not have to be the same, but for our learning purposes if should roughly resemble what I got:
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee44/mcsim_nikul/Light_one.jpg

·The next steps are important for our future texturing: we are going to split this mesh into separate objects, so that each of them would have its own material and texture. Here's a way to do it I figured for myself:
- Make the selection as on picture below:
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee44/mcsim_nikul/Light_select.jpg

- Press Y, and confirm that you are going to split the mesh.
- Press Tab (this will transfer you to the Object Mode), select the mesh, press
Spacebar, and go to Edit->Duplicate.
- A duplicate of your mesh would be created. Hold Ctrl, and drag the duplicate aside from you mesh (to simplify the next step).
- Given that only your duplicate is selected, press Tab (entering into Edit Mode), deselect all, then select one of the vertices on the handle of your light, and one of the vertices near the top. Press Ctrl+L, this will select all the linked vertices to the ones you first selected. Press Delete key, and erase vertices.
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee44/mcsim_nikul/Light_split.jpg

- Enter into Object mode again, and drag your modified duplicate to the place where it first appeared (holding Ctrl will help you to be precise).
Then, being in Object mode, select your original mesh, enter Edit Mode and delete the selected vertices. Now you have 2 objects instead of one.
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee44/mcsim_nikul/Light_objects1.jpg

· Once you have this technique in your pocket, go ahead and separate handle and other right cylindric parts of the mesh from the rest. I colored our new 3 objects in different colors, just fyi, don't do that with your mesh.
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee44/mcsim_nikul/Light_objects.jpg

· Our last object will be inside the blue part. In the object mode press 3 in Num pad, Spacebar, Add->Mesh->Torus. Change minor radius of this torus to .15 before adding it. Drag it and scale so that if would fit in your lamp like this:
http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee44/mcsim_nikul/Light_final.jpg

· Allright, now we are done with our modelling part. The next part is going to be on mapping, texturing, and exporting your mesh. It's coming soon!