My weird, but not so silly tips for drawing a simple bear, or other animals.  What is actually the hardest part of drawing an animal?  Most of us can draw ears, eyes, whiskers, etc.  I think it's the blank page.  Where to start?  How long to make lines?  How big is the head versus the body?  Here is my way to setting up the blank page so I have a guide to follow.  Open a new image 500x500 pixels.  Flood fill it with white.  Now click on the Shapes Presets tool.  Use the Circle.  Uncheck Retain & Antialias, but check Vector!  Did I hear a groan out there?  So you can see what I am talking about, I'm using a brush size of 3 pixels.  For your stained glass patterns, use only 1 pixel.  I'm using black for the vector sections, then I'm going to use purple with the Draw Tool.

Ok........draw your first vector circle.  Let's start with the head.  That's simple, just make a circle like below.  Now add a new vector layer.  Draw a big ellipse for the body.  (for each new vector circle, first add a new vector layer.)  Now make some small circles for ears.  Ok, on to the arms.  Make an ellipse shape and rotate it so the arm is sticking out.  Add a small circle vector for the paw.  Do this on the other side also.  Do the legs and feet the same way.  Let's count.  I should have 12 vector layers now.  Why vectors you ask?  Because I can go back and alter their size or rotation at any point and not lose any clarity.

Once you have played around with moving the various vector layers into something that looks like it could be a sitting bear, it's time to add a new Raster layer to draw on.  Pick a new color to draw with.  Again, I'm using a size 3 brush for this tutorial, but you need to use a size 1 brush to make your stained glass patterns.  Can you see the bear?  Draw around the ears, but when finishing the head, curve in and then out so he doesn't have a totally round face.  Next start where the arms would turn into the shoulder attached to the head.  Or you can draw around the body section.  That's a really fat bear!  I think you can see really clearly when going around the leg and the foot that you don't follow the leg line all the way, but instead you go up and around the foot.

Now turn off the vector layers.  Use the Selection tool, Freehand in this case, to delete the upper body lines.  Now you can just add some curves on the underside of the arms.  Right now you have one of those bears that have the moveable legs.  You can leave your bear like this, or...................

How about making the legs have a thigh?  Put in some test curves like shown below.  Then delete the line where the legs originally went into the body.  Now round out the upper parts of the legs.  Ok, I think this bear is wearing one of those little outfits that snaps underneath!

I think I want my feet pointing out.  So turn on the vector layers that are for the feet.  Rotate them.  After that, first used the selection tool to remove the older lines before drawing the new ones.  Ok!  This bear now has feet that are pointing out!  All you have left to do is little details.  Draw some pads on the feet and paws.  The last thing is to finish off the face details and then your bear is done!

Here is the face closeup.