We found this tutorial for designing a sleek pencil in adobe illustrator cs3. We gave it a try and managed to produce 5 pretty cool 3d pencils. Of course ours don’t look as good as the example pencil on the tutorial website; but for beginners work they’re pretty good.

One critical comment about the tutorial linked to above:  it sort of left us hanging after the instructions “Now, using these colors as a guide, add gradients to each of your shapes”. We spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out how to make the gradient tool work in adobe illustrator; then it finally dawned on us to go look for another tutorial about applying gradients in illustrator. We came across Adobe Illustrator CS3 Tutorial: ‘Everything about Gradients’ and it solved the mystery for us; but aside from that the pencil icon tutorial was pretty good.

You can download our pencils and use them for any purpose. By the way the pencils come jumbo sized. You’ll need to resize them according to your preferred size.