Do a few of those tuts before you start saying that :) This isn't the same as learning how to code, that you have to understand every step along the way. You ne

Do a few of those tuts before you start saying that :) This isn't the same as learning how to code, that you have to understand every step along the way. You need practice, and you can actually just copy what he's showing, and by doing you will learn how these drawings come apart as objects. And as a quick answer to your question: in most of the tuts you always start out with either a rectangle or an ellipse. In fact, what he always does is he picks the object that looks most like the shape he wants to draw. It's either a primitive like the rect or ellipse, but other times he duplicates already existing objects. But it's just shape matching, afaik there's one where he clones the nose to shape into an arm :) The point is you can add and delete nodes using the pen tool, so you can tweak the shape entirely, but it helps if you got somethat to start with that already has the right basic shape.