: Why would an artist avoid the Pen Tool? I am going through some vector tutorials using Inkscape. Part of the author's description of himself states: "I spend most of my time working in Adobe

@Yeniel278

This is more of a long comment

There are quite a lot of times I do not use pen tool. If you draw geometric shapes its often unnecessary to work with the pen tool. To give you an arbitrary example of picture with no need to use the pen tool consider the one below:



Image 1: Image only has lines (original purpose for image)

There is no need to use the pen tool, the image is intentionally simple to drive home this point. The line tool will work just fine. I can always unite the shapes with Ctrl + J, or shape builder Shift + M. The line tool has several advantages over the pen tool in making straight lines.

Do I avoid the pen tool. Certainly not. There are a lot of shapes that can not be done without it. It is just not the tool for everything.



Image 2: Similar image that can be done without using pen tool, now with color fill and curvature to show what can easily be achieved without using pen tool.

However

The pinwheel tutorial you link seems like a situation where i would consider using pen tool, although i could certainly do it using direct selection tool after I've instructed illustrator to make tangents for my segments.

Seems a bit excessive amount of work for the effect. On the other hand, having it done like this makes it easier to follow in the tutorial for more or less exactly the same look. But YMMV.

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