Before you do anything else, remember SPark's first rule of drawing, you can draw! Really you can. You may not draw all that well, that's ok.

Ok, now that we know that, let's look at what we need to do first. I always start drawings with a light skeleton sketch. This particular picture was drawn from a photo, so what I did was look at the photo and see what shapes I could find. I found a lot of circles, but first I measured out the basic proportions with three lines to show how far apart my various circles should go. Than I put on the circles, (They don't need to be perectly round, in fact in this picture, they're more oval shaped, but they don't need to be perfectly oval either.) paying very close attention to how big they should be in comparison to each other. That's important, proportion. If you get things out of proportion, it's the hardest mistake to fix that there is. But before you put a pencil to paper, remeber this: you will make mistakes, and even if, by some miracle, you manage to draw this step perfectly, you'll stilll have to erase some of these lines, so Draw lightly!

The next thing to do is to make your basic circles look more like the actuall shapes in your picture. I've changed the way the simple circles of the body and head look, and altered the shape of the beak as well as adding the outlines of the legs. I also erased a few lines that aren't needed anymore. Proportion here is also very important, and so is drawing lightly.

Now comes the hardest part, adding in the colors. On this picture it's particularly difficult because of the owl's spotted pattern. You have to be very careful not to color over a place that should be a blank white spot. Also, though you don't have to worry about erasing much at this point, still don't color too darkly. When you get to the next step, you'll want to have dark shadows,and if you've colored as darly as you can, you won't be able to color any darker to make shadows.

That last part, the shadows and highlights. Here you look at light and dark, and color those areas that should be dark, as dark as your pencil will let you get. You'll also want a few light spots and highlights, especially in the eyes. Go over every inch of the picture, one way or another. Don't leave any bits colored only lightly. The way you get that slick, polished, 3-D look is by having every inch of the thing you draw covored with pencil. Find a medium color to go over the places that aren't light or dark if you need to.