As an animation, Bakemonogatari has a simple, clean art style. But the guest illustrations for the series are anything but simple! So, it's great to see that °Tens took on a more complex illustration and made it his own with vector gradients so fine at points it more resembles painting that vectoring. Do have a look at this beautiful wallpaper!
Ye mouton knows all ;) I am still a newbie with vectoring programs. In my journal is the progess so far for my Inkscape and AI project. The main difference I noticed so far is that in AI the pentool is editable at all times, in IS it is a different tool
Ctrl is useful when you want to control the angle of the vector. Shift is for asymmetric vector. You can combine the two also. One more thing, if you start an other path while pressing shift and that a former path is selected, the two will combined.
I only use ctrl for zooming, backspace I knew because it is the same in PS and AI. The shift and enter I didn't know, those are useful. I ended a path using right mouse on my last node
You have to finish the path to edit it with the node tool. You can finish a path by closing it up or by pressing enter. You can also go back in the path by pressing backspace. I also suggest you to try pressing shift and ctrl while using the Bezier tool^^