The Polygon Tool is great for drawing basic shapes like squares, hexagons and even stars but did you know you can use it to make more complex shapes?

The key to this technique is to use star type polygons. They have an extra handle that you can use to distort the shape.
Try it by making a 4-sided star polygon.
It will look something like this:

And if you change the Rounded value to 0.5 you’ll see you get smoothed corners.

Now select the Node Editing Tool and move the inner handle inwards to create a thin “plus” shape.

Now move the other node around so that the shape rotates through itself to distort it into a fan shape.

If you select the Polygon Tool again (click on the shape) you can go back and play with how rounded the shape is, how many corners it has, the spoke ratio etc. which will vastly change the shape. Here’s what happens when you round the corners to 2.0.

Increasing the corners to 8 sides creates a completely new shape.

Now if you go back and edit the node positions again you’ll get something different.

As with any object you can resize and rotate in the normal way and edit colours and stroke styles. Here are a few more examples:

Left to right: Corners: 9, Spoke Ratio: 0.295, Rounded: 2 | Corners: 7, Spoke Ratio: 0.016, Rounded: 0.5 | Corners: 16, Spoke Ratio: 0.033, Rounded: 0.5 (with additional bucket fill on outer teardrops).

If you’d like to have a go with the shapes above or use them in your work, download the svg file here and don’t forget to view the license agreement