When I made this, initially placing a soft pink gradient without the extra stroking and edges, it reminded me of the Final Fantasy series' box art. My usual style is very "dirty" so when playing with vectors, as I've done here, I wanted to create something clean and simple. The original image is Victorley within Second Life, standing against a white backdrop. I took that into Photoshop, selected only the non-white areas, then lowered lightness all the way down. This gave me a black silhouette to do a Live Trace on in Illustrator, then after tweaking settings for a well-defined edge, I brought it back into Photoshop, where I applied various layer styles.

Note how even a subtle gradient conveys far more depth than a single matte color. A lot of Web 2.0 sites do exactly that.