I did a sketch and cleanup of a larger view of Natsumi. Hopefully she won’t get mad if she sees this (I’m married to her now!).
As in other images I touched up, I’ve put the intermediate stages here, beginning with the raw photo of the sketch, moving through stages of touch-up in gimp.
Raw sketch image.
Make it look like the outline of an 8-bit game character…
Sketch with big chunks of the background removed.
A bit more detailed outline work…
Sketch after detailed outline removal.
After getting a bit of the easy smudge work out of the way…
Sketch after some early smudge work.
Now a bit more detail work…
Sketch after some detail smudge work.
And some brightness/contrast work…
The sketch after some brightening.
It appears I stopped here. I never did refine the hard pencil outlines. Meh.