Alright, I've gotten a few requests for how to make your own cartoon animals (or whatever) in Adobe Illustrator. I'll outline a quick process using this amazing dart frog photo from my homie @DamienEsquerre. And we'll (hopefully) end up with a highly stylized drawing.

To be clear: this assumes that you're familiar with the general Adobe Illustrator tools (artboards, pencil, layers, fills vs. strokes). That said, the beauty of Illustrator is that any questions can easily be YouTube'd. Honestly the best Illustrator tool is just YouTube.

Start by choosing a good photo that's representative of your critter, so we don't have to get all Da Vinci on it. I use the pencil tool to quickly create an outline of the animal, with the pencil fidelity (trueness to your cursor) set to moderate.

My PhD says I'm computer literate, but Twitter says I'm not. Let's try to get the rest of the videos up.

Using the pencil tool again, isolate blocks of color or pattern that you'd like to split up. Keep the lines smooth and the colors chunky for a stylized look. Make sure the lines completely cross your original outline, or are completely contained within it.

Once you've split up your critter, we'll select all the lines (Cmd+A) and use the Divide tool in the Pathfinder window to make shapes out of the space between our strokes. You can always add segments back together with the Unite tool.

Now we can start filling in our shapes with color. The easiest way is using the Eyedropper tool to steal the color from the image in the background. Alternatively, choose your own (color) adventure. This is a great way to emphasize/exaggerate color and pattern!

Keep filling in your colors. Be creative, use darker shades to give some shadow and depth. Give some reflection in the eye so it doesn't look like a sorry puppet.

Make sure to remove the stroke color from your shapes! Play around with your new drawing. Copy the entire layer and change the colors, see if you like it more (you've always got Cmd+Z to undo things).

Finally, when you're done, make sure to save your .ai file. Save a copy as a vectorized image (.pdf) that you can edit in AI, and export a copy as a .png that you can throw into PowerPoint presentations, Twitter, or whatever else.
Go forth and scribble!
(please ask questions)