Continuous Pencil

Well, the “Liquid Pencil” turned out to be a dud, so how about a more modest bit of pencil inventiveness?

Most of us who use wooden drawing pencils have experienced the stub problem; once your wooden pencil is worn down to a stub that’s too small to comfortably use, what do you do with it? (You can’t just waste all of that wonderful, not to mention expensive, graphite goodness.)

The usual tack is some kind of pencil holder or extension, but these are often awkward, a bit too thick and not as nice as the experience of drawing with a fresh, new wooden pencil.

Well the Continuous Pencil concept from Yanko Design seeks to resolve that, and looks to be a clever and quite workable solution.

The Continuous Pencil is essentially modular, each pencil has a hollow end, into which will fit the thin graphite-filled extension on the business end of the new pencil, essentially forming a new whole that can be sharpened with sharpener or knife, as would be a new single pencil.

So far it’s just a concept, but it’s nice to see even the humble pencil being rethought in imaginative ways.

“What about just using a mechanical pencil?”, you ask. Well, they’re nice for some kinds of drawing, (and there are some nice new variations on that idea, like the Uni-ball Kuru Toga Pencil that mechanically rotates the tip as you draw to keep it sharp), but they don’t do much for those of us who like to draw with a knife-sharpened, chiseled or sanded point in all of its glorious variations.

For that, try moving up from a mechanical pencil a 2mm lead holder.

[Via Wired’s Gadget Lab]