When I was working as a freelancer I was asked to work on private projects as well. Many of those were about photo correction and retouch of portraits and I want to write about one of the most interesting: the creation of an avatar like portrait starting from a regular picture. For privacy reasons I cannot publish the original portrait I worked on, so I took some open source resources and I created a new picture.
To demonstrate I chose to use a Natalie portman photo (remind that to have a good result the picture resolution must be high). The main traces to draw in the modified picture are the blue skin colour, the big yellow eye, the feline nose and pointy ears. The challenge was to mantain a realistic feeling and not to overdoo the portrait so you can sill recognise the persone.
Here you can look at the result:
Alessandra Castrioto 