First time really trying to draw a cleaned up cartoon character in a paint program. Had to study the character for a few hours before I could draw her "on model" freehand.

Technical Breadcrumbs
Here's the original hand colored art straight from the scanner, before digital retouching. After scanning, I re-flattened the colors, then selected the color areas and applied gradients. Added highlights and halftones on a separate layer in Gimp with the opacity set to 33%. Highlights drawn in white, halftones in black. At 33% opacity, gives a nice flat effect.

Need to fix those veritcal hair highlights; they should be half bright like the horizontal one, and cleaned up. Was still 'experimenting'..

I see the right way to do this is to just scan the rough drawing, re-draw it /all/ with vectors, and dumping the original lineart completely (unlike what I did here), and redoing it /all/ digitally to make a nice clean drawing. For characters like this, the computer is just better at doing clean curved lines. It's easy to see the benefits of making all the shapes (including halftones) be extensions of other shapes in the drawing. Guess I'll try experimenting with this more in the future. I don't normally draw 'clean' art, I like the rough stuff. But it's a good experiment..