Siamese cat in acrylic paint

My New Years resolution for my pet portraits this year was to learn how to paint. Being self taught I have only ever been confident with drawing and don't seem to be able to control a paint brush the way I can a pencil, however I really want to be able to offer a colour medium and i'm finding coloured pencils very slow. I think using paint will be quicker and hopefully produce better results. I have decided to use Acrylics as they are very versatile - they can be used thick straight from the tube to produce an oil-like effect, or can be watered down for a more watercolour effect. They dry quickly, which can also be a bad thing!

So today I started a demo from a book I have called 'painting animal friends' by Jeanne Filler Scott. I've only done step one, so it doesn't look that exciting, but it looks like it does in the book: