Announced by Eiowjroie, think I will give it a try.
There is still some time remaining till deadline.
My concept is to bend a pencil graphically to a spiral-like form, which, also forms a subtle 9 character in that manner.

The idea was on my mind ever since found Brynn's article and Aaron Nieze's quick tip on drawing a crazy pencil.
Firstly I thought this needed some fine tuning, will see if it can be spiced up in action.


first drafts:






Font used: xm yekan.

To make the "bent gradient" look on a simple stroke, a custom marker with gradient is used,
which marker is made with masking.

Then, to add a 3D look, the diffuse lighting filter is used.
On it?
If it could work that simple...

Somehow the filter editor doesn't let to use the tones of the object as an imput for that filter -as a bump map, perhaps-.
What it actually can use, is the alpha values.
So once a bent gradient will be ready, it will need to be applied as a layer mask over something,
then it needs to be clipped for the actual shape.
Sort of.
Because after the masking, it still needs to be put into a group, otherwise it produces rendering issues.

The thickening of the pencil shape to the end will need some blending in too, so time will tell.

Trying it without the filter:

Still without the filter, trying to blend in the end.

Now the basic part with filtering:

Nice work so far!

I'm still not liking the curved tip (just as a personal thing). But for constructive comments: To my eye, the spiral doesn't seem symmetrical. Is it sort of flattened slightly? The slight flattening seems to cause the tip to be curved too much....kind of too tight curve. Well, I know fixing that means starting almost from the beginning, but just a comment. I think I might like the curved tip better, if it wasn't so curved, or so tightly curved. Maybe you used spiro spline for spiral?

Here's PNG attempting to show non-symmetry overall, and focusing on the tip. Don't think I can attach SVG, since PNG will be hard to see. But I could send on IC, one way or another. Rats, I forgot - can't even attach PNG

The very thin green circle, if you could zoom in, shows that the pencil lead doesn't have a smooth curve on the outer edge (inside pink circle). The huge blue spiral shows lack of symmetry, and also blue double-side arrows, indicate odd spacing.

None of that is such a big deal, really. But usually you're so precise about everything. So I thought worth mentioning.

Thank's for the comment and suggestion!

The core of the pencil was drawn with spiro-path, manually; nothing too geometrical.
Proportions are chosen to fill up as much space as possible, the distances at the double sided arrows were intentional.
This way the shape gets more depth, and, the white space in between looks similar to a "9" shape.

The tip of the pencil will really need reworking, I'm not satisfied with it in it's current shape.

But as a whole, the diffuse filtered look should really be on focus, wondering if it comes out right?
There is a small Moiré-like effect which I don't like, though blurring would cause it to be "smudged".

A few steps back:

Getting closer a bit:

So here it is, the concept close to finish.
Some little "plus" is still missing.
Probably the lettering of inkscape is not legible this way, would need a better signature too.

Getting better.

Will consider this finished:



As actually drawn with the current stabile, it responds slowly due the filters and the pattern along path lpe-s.
Though the contest was meant to showcase the new features, improvements in the rendering system is much related.


Edit: posted into the finished inkscape works board, with a link to the original svg file:
http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17862