Mascot on Steroids

For New Media tools we were practicing with the pen tool in Illustrator, and grasping the concept of tracing stuff out.

Our assignment was to choose either a team logo from the NHL or NBA or NBL or NFL.

I chose the Florida Panthers (mainly cause it looked way badass):

I haz play fetch?

I took two different approaches for this assignment. It was annoying to figure out what part to trace first. I tried to tell myself to get the bodies of yellowish fur first, but then that led to me being annoyed at how much time is being wasted. So I went with tracing a huge black outline of the beast:

Second layer was the fur:

White fur:

... and finally the details:

I chose this because it looked challenging enough.

And I'm not gonna lie, it was. Well it was really time consuming and it had me debating against sharp corners or curvy corners... I didn't know which would look better. I guess you could say this is my like, rough? I really want to make it better, but only if I find the time to. You gotta deal with this for now!

Edit: Curious about how long it took to complete this? After starting over twice, I would say it took about 3.5 hours. Breaking it down to about an hour for each layer. I don't know if that's bad or good...

SUPER NEW EDIT! :

Spent a little more time on it, fixing a few things here and there and adding a bit more detail...

These colors look better