Inkscape

Several new modes in the Tweak tool - Move, Move In/Out, Move Jitter, Scale, Rotate, and Duplicate/Delete - make it possible to easily and naturally manipulate any number of separate objects, such as a tiling of clones. With a few soft brush strokes, you can turn a regular tiling into a freeform cloud, "power field," or even a complete drawing as in this example.

Inkscape now features Spiro curves (Cornu spirals) introduced to design world by Raph Levien. While FontForge is the first (open source) project that has implementation of Spiro, Inkscape provides a number of features unmatched by other tools, as demonstrated by Andy Fitzsimon. Spiro curves are implemented as a live path effect and can be applied to any existing Bézier path or be drawn from scratch with either Pen or Pencil tool.

Pinkitude by QuicheLoraine was the Grandprize Winner of the Pinkitude for Life contest that was a joint effort between MGM, Susan G. Komen for the cure foundation, & deviantART to promote early detection as the key to breast cancer prevention among young women and teens. A few of the features used were gradients with transparencies, filters, and patterns. As a community, we're proud of QuicheLoraine and the use of inkscape for another, more serious, community effort relating to women's health and the early detection of one of the most prevalent health risks to women.

Inkscape has seen some enhancements over the past few releases which have been able to better equip artists with the tools necessary to create photorealistic vector work. This screenshot by maddrum is of his most dedicated and accurate attempt at photorealism, and he feels that this is probably his limit (we'll see about that). He used fairly conventional vector drawing methods for most of the work using the Bézier & node tools primarily. Filters were used quite liberally to achieve the subtle shading and coloring. The amazing job on her hair was drawn with the calligraphy tool using a graphics tablet.