progression

I am still incredibly new to Illustrator and Photoshop, so everytime I learn anything new, it makes a huge difference. Case in point is my profile pic. First I sketched the picture with pencil on tracing paper.

My 1st attempt at drawing the image in Illustrator:

I was playing with gradients a little, but my lines are horrible. I am NOT proficient with the pen tool. Hopefully practice really does make perfect.

My 2nd attempt in Illustrator:

I learned a little bit about mesh gradients, which I incorporated into the shoes and hair. Also, some of the line work is a little better. Maybe in 6 months I'll take another stab at it to see how far I've come.

Edited to add: I didn't export very high quality images from Illustrator, so they are pixelated. The real images are much smoother. If I get around to it, I'll export them as PNG files and post again.