Explore Python Turtle: Draw Shapes, Change Pens, and Fill Colors

What is Turtle?

Turtle (also known as turtle graphics) is a Python drawing library that simulates a small turtle moving on the screen; the path it crawls forms the drawn graphics.

Basic Concepts

There are two essential concepts in Turtle:

Screen: The drawing area where you can set size and background color. The coordinate origin is at the center of the screen.

Turtle (pen): The drawing tool created from the Turtle class. It has properties such as color, line width, position, and direction.

Drawing a Rectangle

The following example shows how to draw a rectangle using Turtle.

Code (shown as an image):

Changing Pen Attributes

You can modify the pen’s color, width, and other attributes.

Setting the Pen

Setting the pen includes choosing its shape, size, and style.

Filling Colors

Use begin_fill() and end_fill() to fill shapes with color.

Drawing Basic Shapes

Turtle can draw lines, arcs, and text, which can be combined to create various polygons.

Drawing a Star

The example below demonstrates how to draw a five‑pointed star.

Drawing Circles and Arcs

Since Turtle can draw arcs, it can also draw circles. The following example shows both.

Code (shown as an image):

This article is excerpted from the book Learn Python with Comics 2: Fun, Informative, Playful, and Useful (Full‑Color Advanced Edition) , which provides a comic‑style approach to teaching Python concepts.