I started the drawing by placing a photo that I took at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The photo was synced from my desktop to my iPad using Lightroom Mobile. I traced the photo with a black marker pen on a draw layer above the image layer.

My previous drawing of the Warthog was filled with complex lines that followed the texture of the warthog skin. When I finished the Warthog I decided that my next drawing would be much simpler. Complexity comes naturally to me. Simple does not. It took me a few tries at this drawing before I was happy with the direction.

I found color inspiration at color.adobe.com. Under the Explore panel I the searched for 1970. I found two themes that I liked, and added them to my growing Zoo Animal Library which is shown below.

First the shapes were filled with solid colors. I finished off the drawing with highlights, shadows and whiskers to the Meerkat's face. I created additional draw layers for these details. This is the first illustration in the series with this much face modeling detail.

Mandalas were drawn for the background using the app iOrnament. The app allows for all kinds of color and brush styles, but I kept these drawings in solid black and white so that I could easily convert them to vector art.

The Mandalas were converted to vector art using Adobe Capture. Some of the finer details were lost or distorted in the conversion, but I actually like the organic vector results better than the originals.

The Mandala shapes were saved to my Zoo Animal CC Library and then placed into my Meerkat Draw project. Two different Mandalas were placed at different transparencies on a dark blue shape to create the background texture.

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