I don't know if digital painting is regarded as vectoring, tell me if it is. I use to do the pen tool approach to things but after a while I found it very boring since the process usually takes such a long time and requires a lot of free time which I don't have.
Unless your trying to do something very simplistic and clip-art styled I strongly suggest using a drawing pad. It will help you achieve your desired result quicker and I know some links to some great tutorials that helped me when I started out.
I'm not saying all pen-tooled vectors are bad, just achieving a really nice result sometimes requires thousands of layers where as digital painting usually requires one.
