So okay. Did you know that adobe illustrator is really good at making simple shaded stuff? Since people seem to go bananas over images in color (and having been told by  kattywampus that coloring in Illustrator is way easier than I thought it was), I decided to give it a shot.

Most of this image was done using solid paths, with the coloring for the head done as its own path, and some highlights here and there to fill in the gaps in places where the paths didn't cover the appropriate parts with color. I want to say it took an hour or so to make, but it probably took a bit longer than that.

Unlike raster images, editing a vector image for major changes is somewhat trivial. Unfortunately, minor tweaks which are easy to achieve in raster are annoying and complicated with vector. Therefore, it seems that the best way to composite these sorts of drawings would be to do most of the work in illustrator, and take it to photoshop for post-processing. This is what the foreground image looked like in Illustrator, before any post-processing.