How to create a super shiny pencil icon in Photoshop
Eren Göksel wrote a tutorial that anyone can follow to create a drawing of a pencil in Photoshop.
The Pencil is one of the visual metaphors most used to express creativity. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to draw a pencil icon. We'll have a look at gradients, selection tools, and basic transform operations. Let's have some fun with this.I'd love to see Boing Boing readers' variations on this. If you create one, please link to it in the comments section.
the latest
latest episodes
Too super shiny! Aaaarrrgggg - look away!
I would have varied the specular/reflectivity and roughness of the pencil's various parts. The exposed wood between the main body and the lead should be fairly non-shiny. It would have made the pencil look better to break up the shine a little. Same thing with the eraser. Use of atypical colors seems odd.
It's a little weird to see so much vector styled graphics generated using a raster based software.
what kind of eraser is that shiny and black any way? That thing couldn't erase squat.
Also, needs more lens flares.
Guys, look at the pixels. It's totally been shopped.
Relax. Take a deep breath. Just remember, it's a 'stylized' representation of a pencil.
I likeit, but Lucifer has a point... why do it outside of a vector based drawing program, except for the drop shadow, maybe.
What happens if you want your shiny pencil icon to cover the side of a bus?
I haven't really done that kind of thing - vector-style gradient stuff in photoshop - before (fancy that) so I thought I'd have a go. Using Photoshop Elements, so I messed with the instructions (as well as drawing a intuos stylus instead). I'm sure GIMP would perform admirably too.
Pencils - when I started as designer for a student newspaper I still had a lecturer's injunction that "a pencil is a designer's first tool" ringing in my ears. So I called the hard drive on the new G4 "pencil".
I'd make a shiney new crackpipe logo but I pawned my comp.
Flat beer! Shiny pencils! Is there any end to the wonders of Photoshop?
I like the fact that they used Perspective transform to make the texture fit the end of the pencil but then didn't use it to give the actual pencil any perspective.
The pencil's too shiny (especially the wood & the eraser), the shadow is too deep considering how much light the "table" surface and the pencil both reflect, and the circle perspective is way off.
But hey, it would look good as a Mac icon!
Ditto the "not really a Photoshop project" sentiment. Which I also made note of about the beer tutorial as well.
It's great that Photoshop is incorporating a lot more drawing tools nowadays. But it's still a bitmap image editing tool and not a drawing tool. It's like using a knife as a screwdriver. Sure, the tool is designed in such a way as to work for your purpose, but there is a better tool that's specifically designed for what you are trying to do.
This makes me want to take up my roommates offer of Photoshop lessons. I also would change some of the shinyness and definately the colors - i'm thinking of my favorite pencil in 6th grade. The shiny wood could be explained as that fake plastic composite wood stuff that they make inferior pencils out of, but my pencil would be real wood.
@SAMF
Photoshop is not a drawing tool? You could have fooled me. I guess I'll quit my job as using photoshop as a drawing tool was what I was hired to do. I guess I should tell the various digital art/illustration websites that they should stop as well.
It may not have been CREATED as a drawing tool, but it certainly is (and a wonderful one to boot)!
A step-by-step guide to creating a metaphor for creativity?
I second #5. If I painted a pencil this way, I doubt anyone would nitpick the shininess. Art isn't just about mimicking reality.
the super shiny pencil is too super short! creativity...being...sapped...away..by..too..short..pencil....uuhhhhhhnngg...
Ok, I'll bite--here's my version.
http://www.cloudform.com/2008/08/28/i-made-a-pencil/
For all the naysayers, as you can I improved on the tutorial and made it super-realistic.
I have to say I'm impressed that nobody has linked to Rick Astley in this thread. Kudos, interwebs!
As a filmmaker I use Photoshop a lot and I almost never touch Illustrator, so this tutorial was really helpful for me in ways that a tutorial showing me how to draw a pencil in Illustrator would not have been. I learned some nifty keystrokes that I was unfamiliar with to boot.
I'd link to my pencil, but because I followed the instructions rather closely, it's pretty much identical to the example pencil, so I won't bother.