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Drawing arrows in Paint.NET the smart way

Here’s a confession. I was doing something dumb for quite a while and I didn’t even try to improve it for a while, satisfied with the mediocre workaround I had made myself. I was drawing arrows in Paint.NET by connecting 3 lines. It wasn’t a horrible thing to do but it was more work and lower quality than I could have gotten by better understanding the software.

Here’s an example of a hand-drawn arrow. It’s inconsistent and doesn’t look that great. I have drawn far too many of them over the years.

Instead of using 3 lines to draw an arrow, you can go to the toolbar at the top of the window. By default there are 3 drop-downs with lines in them. You can change the style of either end and the middle to be flat, rounded, or two different styles of arrows. Choosing the Filled Arrow, I can now draw a consistent arrow with a single drag.

With the arrow drawn but still selected, you can increase the size of the brush width to increase the size of the arrow. You can also change the arrow’s color using the color fields at the same time.

No plugin necessary and you can easily draw arrows on your images easily now. Very handy for documentation or reviewing wireframes.