Full view is a must. I'm really proud of this piece! ASCII is becoming one of my favourite artforms to work in. I've tried to be more active in the defense and promotion of this kind of art lately.

> *ahem* I started this picture 4 days ago with a rough sketch made of $$. Then I began smoothing the outlines with a wide variety of characters, mainly commas, colons and accents, but also d, b, Y, 7 and even j. Achieving nice, smooth horizontal curves in this style is pretty difficult. Then I worked on the shading, mainly composed of $, S, % and : (from the brightest to the darkest). I learned most of my techniques while making Emeralds, my previous ASCII picture.

> I didn't use any reference, but it would have been a good idea to use one. I'm not sure if the face is anatomically correct, and that's one of my main weaknesses in any artform: faces. Anyway, it reminds me a lot of this girl who was in my class two years ago.

> And no, I didn't use any image-to-ASCII converter. I wasn't looking for an automatic picture, I wanted a nice, smooth picture. If anyone says "hey, why do you make it by hand, there are programs to do that", please don't expect a reply. Other comments are still extremely appreciated.
I used PabloDraw, a free textmode art editor. My canvas was 80 characters wide. You can see the original .txt file if you click "download".

EDIT: Applied many of `diamondie's suggestions, in particular, replacing characters like ª and *. I tried to make sure that this picture used only standard ASCII characters, and this took many revisions because of my nasty ADD. If you want to see it with extended ones, here is the picture.
> Sorry for the many resubmissions. The last one is because I'm selling this as a print, like what the ~mimic group does