Haha, I keep wanting to call this done and you guys drag me back in!
In a good way, of course.
You may notice the border got much bigger; as it turns out tumblr resizes avatars to 128 so I had to compensate. Not big on the huge border lines, but eh, could be worse.
I tried to take all the points of your edit into account, Jeremy, at least partially. You actually seem to hit on all my problem areas, so thanks! Though your version looks a little more angry with the stronger highlights near the mouth, so I kept mine toned down a bit (not sure if they work though
).
This turned out really well! Not sure if the text placement works compositionally for the best (it creates a V shape, which has been distracting for me). But I'm not good with these things anyway, so I'm probably wrong.
Thanks! I'm glad for the encouragement, I can never tell if my improvements only look better to me or if I'm actually getting any better at this stuff.
And I mean hey, if the V shape is distracting then you're effectively not looking at it, right? >>
edit:
Made some more tweaks