Create an animal in Illustrator

Spring has sprung (finally) and warm weather is bringing out all sorts of creatures. In my back yard, I've seen birds, squirrels, possums, mice and moles already this season. They are the inspiration for our next project.

You should be familiar with Illustrator's tools by now. You even have some experience using it from our last assignment. Now is the time to put some of your new knowledge to work and actually create something in Illustrator.

For our next assignment, I want you to create some Illustrator animals!

When drawing anything, it helps me to start out by sketching my ideas using pencil and paper. While I am not requiring you turn in sketches for this assignment, I think it will help you achieve a better result if you do your "experimenting" using pencil and paper before working on the computer.

Before you try working on the computer, have a look at a few videos to get you started. This project should be fun and I want you to enjoy it. Don't worry about technical problems, just draw and have fun. The more you use Illustrator, the better you will get at it. See what a few other artists do when they want to create Illustrator animals:

Behance: Making a simple animal in Illustrator

Draw a cute panda bear using Illustrator

Creating a simple cartoon face

Once you have your ideas down for some illustrator animals, it's time to get to work. I'm going to give you tonight and Wednesday night to work on these. TAKE YOUR TIME. Don't worry about the details or making them too perfect. I'd rather see you making more animals (and getting more experience using illustrator) than seeing you try to make one animal too perfect.

I will expect to see at least THREE animals in your project. More is fine, but three is a minimum. Heads, whole bodys, etc are all o.k. Please feel free to look up other tutorial videos if you want to see other techniques. If you do this, please share them with me if you thought they were good videos!

Work hard on these. I want to see some great animals when this project is done!

Now, get to work. :)