Digital Art Shirt extending, Tattoo removal, and overall Recolouring eh?

Yo, it's been a while since I've posted in this section. I've been continuing to edit graphics even in my absence from here and now here is one of my latest efforts just for the hell of it.
So I'm preparing a character for an upcoming RP (the character as usual is based on one of my own novel characters), and started off with this image for a base (For those interested, the girl pictured is Anarge Huckebein from the Nanoha series). She for the most part suited the right sort of build, hair style, haircolour(ish) and various needs that I wanted, but there were also a few things that I definitely needed to change to make her just right. So then I started to work on it little by little:

Original Image:


So for a start... my character doesn't have the tattoos... and that shirt is a bit too... short? So I started by working on that. I will mention now that I did this all manually using simply the pen tool and matching the colours and blending them in. I used a similar method for the shirt by getting the main shirt colour and then tracing along the main body shape and did the same for the shading by extending it downwards and trying to help leave some shape for the breasts underneath the shirt by tracing the shadow over some of the curves that had been visible from underneath the shirt.
Also, I changed her eye colour to orange and then used the hue-saturation tool to make the hair a more vivid red. This is where I got after all of that:

After Tattoo removal, extending the shirt and minor recolouring on hair and eyes:


Next up was the clothing which was a bit more difficult. The green clothes didn't suit my characters style or colour scheme, and so I achieved this by creating multiple layers of the same image and using various tools such as manually pen tracing colour over the clothes directly, blending, smudging and other things...
I had tried at first to make my life easier and use hue-saturation again (kinda like I did for the hair) but it didn't work the way I wanted (various complications occurred as certain parts weren't changed or the wrong parts were instead. Grr...) and besides, I feel overall that just by manually changing things as I went along, while it would take longer and was more difficult, gave me a lot more accuracy than I'd have achieved otherwise.
I also slightly tweaked the vividness of the red hair again since the red jacket now took away from some of the hair's original impact.
This is the latest result:

After Clothing Recolour:


For now this may be one of the final drafts so to speak (It's far from perfect, so I may work on neatening it up as well as making some further changes). I'm personally not quite sure as to what other changes I'd make yet. I think the red on the jacket might be a bit too striking, so I will perhaps work on dulling that down a bit to look more suitable. But for the most part, I'm pretty happy with how she's turned out so far. I can at least definitely use this. I will say... This is perhaps the MOST editing I've ever done just for an RP character's image. lol


Also, here is a little sig of her that I've mocked up for now:



I'm far from happy with it. Others have liked it, while one or two others have said it is too busy.
Personally, I'm not sure that the floral patterns suit the type of person she is anyway. I'll likely start from scratch with this banner, but thought I'd show what I have so far.


Either way, any comments and stuff would be appreciated.
As I said, I just felt like sharing something with you guys after so long. So yeah.

 

Funny you should say that.
I have an update.

Jacket has been darkened so it no longer looks like shiny red plastic.
Also, I blended the shading on the right leg in better so it looks like a smooth gradient instead of cutting off.
Finally I neatened up some lines more among other things.

Thanks for the advice on the shorts though. I'll work on that next. Someone else made the same comment so yeah.


Lastest:



And updated banner to match: