Wow, snazzy new forums. New Soul Calibur game as well, so Tira gets a new look too. If anyone knows an easy way to get an alpha transparency on an image with a white background like this, please do tell. Internet Explorer 6 may not be able to handle it, but anyone using that deserves to see broken pages.
Incidentally, I got this avatar on my very first attempt at it. I cropped original the image down until it looked right, resized it to 120 pixels wide, and it came out at 120x120! A little sharpening and I was done. It's also about 6KB smaller than the old avatar was.
Edit: Eureka! Remembered that I actually did this before (and even
posted about it), though it was a bit trickier this time around. It's also about 6KB bigger (30295 bytes vs. 24715 bytes), making it almost exactly the same size I started with (30757 bytes). This one should look good on any theme though.