Flat-Art Puppy Character Design in Adobe Illustrator

Create the puppy’s feet and legs in illustrator using rounded rectangles, align them precisely, choose brown fills from swatches, and remove strokes for a flat-art look suitable for Instagram.

Create the puppy's body by drawing an ellipse and placing it beneath the dog. Use the shape builder with alt/option to subtract shapes for the legs and paws.

Create the puppy head from a triangle, flip it, then round corners. Add ears with ellipses, use shape builder to combine, and duplicate for the second ear.

Use ellipses to design a puppy's mouth and nose in Adobe Illustrator, drawing a tongue, a perfect circle, and a black nose, then copy, color, and place.

Create a shiny nose by placing a white ellipse on the puppy's nose. Build the eyes with a white circle, a black circle, and a tiny white circle, duplicating them.

Create the tail by duplicating a circle with the alt/option key, subtracting the overlap with the cut-out tool, and then layering the tail behind the puppy using the arrange command.

Shade the puppy by overlaying a black rectangle, subtract non-puppy areas with the shape builder, adjust opacity for subtle shading, then export as JPEG or PNG for the web.

Duplicate the dog artboard with move artwork via the artboard tool and option/alt, then draw smooth shading lines with the pencil tool while setting fill and stroke to none.

Select the dog, convert it to a live paint object, and use the live paint bucket to color sections, then adjust shadows and bring the shadow to the front.

Create a subtle bone pattern background in Illustrator using rectangles and circles, snap joints with Shift and Alt copies, unite shapes with the shape builder, and color in pale yellow.

Drag the bone into the swatches to create a repeating pattern, then open the pattern editor to switch to brick by row, adjust spacing, and scale or rotate for refinement.

Select the bone pattern, scale it to 60% with transform pattern, then rotate it about 46 degrees without rotating the object. Send the pattern to the back and adjust opacity.

Add text puppy clinic in Illustrator, scale with the shift key, adjust clinic size in the character panel, choose a stylish font and blue color, rotate and position it.

Move the puppy and its shadow, deselect the bones with shift, then export for screens on two artboards: a 1080 social jpeg and a 4000-pixel print jpeg.