Anyone who knows me knows I approve of any drawing exercise that eschews the Pen tool. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the power of a finely crafted Bezier curve, it’s just that I’m completely inept at using the tool used to create them in Adobe Illustrator.

That’s why this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode is particularly, delightfully, useful to me. Using a variety of Illustrator features, none of which are the Pen tool itself, Deke reveals the variety of implements he used to create the Pen tool icon in last week’s useful graphic, which, ironically, showed you how to understand the various states of the Pen tool:

For the record, I highly approve of irony. (By the way, if you love the Pen tool, or wish you loved it, or have always been slightly confused by what it’s trying to tell you, you can actually download this very chart from last week’s post.)

The icon takes shape via a combination of the Line Segment tool, the Reflect tool, the Round Corners option, the Rotate tool, and, of course, the Transform command (for the itinerant asterisk that accompanies the Pen tool cursor in its native state.) Even if you’re not interested in the Pen tool per se, this exercise will empower you with an entire toolset at the ready for the next iconic rendering you might attempt.