A first tour of the drawing tools in Vectornation
Pen, curvature, pencil, knife, scissors, shape builder, live paint and live shapes in Vectornation by Zaweba, and which tool to reach for first.
Opening a professional vector editor for the first time can feel like walking into a workshop where every wall is covered in tools. Vectornation by Zaweba has the full set: pen, curvature, pencil, knife, scissors, shape builder and live paint, live shapes with corner widgets and 17 extra shapes besides. The good news is that you only need a handful to make something good, and the rest can wait until a job asks for them.
Here's how I'd introduce the drawing tools to someone starting out, roughly in the order you'll need them.
Start with live shapes
Most drawings are built from simple shapes far more than people expect. A logo might be a circle, a rounded rectangle and a couple of triangles. Vectornation's live shapes stay live after you draw them, so you can resize them or drag a corner widget to round the corners whenever you like, rather than redrawing.
Then there are the 17 extra shapes, such as cogs, clouds and hearts. They're quick ways into the kind of thing that's tedious to draw by hand. A cog for an engineering logo or a cloud for a weather icon is a click and a drag rather than an afternoon with the pen.
Combining shapes with the shape builder
The shape builder is where simple shapes become interesting ones. Overlap a few shapes, select them, and merge or remove the overlapping pieces by working directly on the parts you can see. It's an intuitive way to carve a crescent moon from two circles, or build a speech bubble from an ellipse and a triangle. For more formal combinations, the full Pathfinder is there too.
The pen and curvature tools
Sooner or later you'll want a shape no preset gives you. That's what the pen is for. Click to place corner points, click and drag to make smooth curves, and the path follows. It takes a little practice, but it's the most precise drawing tool there is, and it's the same idea in every serious vector editor, so the skill travels.
If the pen feels fiddly, the curvature tool is a gentler start. You click points and Vectornation draws smooth curves through them, adjusting as you add more. It's lovely for organic shapes like leaves, waves and lettering.
Editing the points afterwards
Version 0.10 made point editing much nicer. Each point can be switched between corner, smooth and cusp with one key. Refitting tidies a path with too many points. And you can delete points without breaking the shape, so cleaning up a drawing doesn't mean redrawing it.
Pencil, knife, scissors and live paint
The pencil is for drawing freehand, as you would on paper. It's good for sketches, loose lines and anything that should look hand drawn, and it pairs well with a pen tablet.
The knife and scissors cut. The knife slices through shapes along the line you draw, which is a quick way to split a shape into pieces. The scissors cut a path at a point, opening it up so you can separate or rejoin it.
Live paint treats a drawing like a colouring book. Draw some overlapping lines and shapes, turn them into a live paint group, and you can fill each enclosed area with colour, even areas that aren't separate shapes. It's brilliant for colouring a line drawing or a cartoon.
Where to go from here
Learn live shapes and the shape builder first, then the pen. That covers most logos, icons and diagrams. Pick up the curvature tool, the pencil and live paint as your drawings get more organic, and the knife and scissors when you need to rework something.
Vectornation runs offline on Windows, Mac and Linux with no account and no subscription, and saves to its own .vecz format or plain SVG. Draw a few shapes, combine them, and you'll find the rest of the workshop starts to make sense.
