As part of the STA training, I made a live trace of a panda as well as a series of shapes to learn more about shape manipulation. The panda live trace turned out okay, but it didn’t have as many details as the example simply because fur has less details than feathers.
After doing the shape manipulation, I realized that I want to learn more about the pathfinder function in Illustrator since it seems like it could be very powerful depending on how skilled the user is. It’ll also keep me from doing sketchy methods to try to fix a shape.