Finished Product
To make a simple pencil in illustrator one may think to just use different shapes with different colors. While this is effective, without proper use of gradients you may get this “blah” kind of pencil with no real depth.
To start off we’re goin to use some simple shapes but if you don’t want to run into problems with the layering you might want to draw them in a specific order: first draw the tip of the pencil (the bottom two pieces), then the shaft, followed by the eraser, and finally, the metal eraser housing.
Lets work on the simpler gradients first. For the eraser, a light pink to a darker pink linear gradient is used. The led, a dark grey to black linear gradient. And the pencil tip is a light wood color to a darker wood color linear gradient.
Now for the matal eraser housing. For the main gradient go to your swatches libraries menu choose gradients then metals. I find that the silver gradient looks best. If you’d like, tweek this gradient a little to make it your own. Now copy (ctrl [command] + C) and paste-in-front (ctrl [command] + F) this shape and make it shorter; switch out the lighter colors in the gradient with darker ones. Holding alt (option) and draging the shape down will make a copy of it. Now add four, medium-grey ovals to finish off the eraser housing.
The gradient for the shaft of the pencil gets a little more complicated. Choose a linear gradient and make four stops with different shades of the same color. Now drag the top gradient sliders all the way to the right.
Using the warp tool at the bottom of the shaft make a random cutting pattern.
Finally click the pencil tip and go to Effect > Stylize > Inner Glow; select a darker color; make sure the mode is set to multiply, opacity to 75, and blur to 5; check edge and press Ok.
To finish off the pencil group all of the objects together by selecting them all and pressing ctrl (command) + G. Give your pencil a nice drop shadow (Effect > Stylize > Drop Shadow) and your done!
Now you can add some text on the side and a “2″ to really make it look like a pencil. And I’m sorry about the random green, I’m slightly color blind. Lol
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