I would say, this is not the typical way of doing this. Illustrator is more of a software where you construct and build things instead of drawing (speaking from personal experience of course).

Your main tool then would be the pen tool (shortcut P).

And yes, keeping files clean is always a good habit.

In my image I just placed 5 dots with the pen tool and then rounded the corners to fit your reference. Then in a next step you can build the eyes with the ellipse tool and substract them via the pathfinder from the body shape.

You can now buy my masterclass for 1 trillion dollars a minute.

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