try www.wacom.com. by the way you may want to invest in a tablet. you can try running some filters in photoshop and use the history brush. you could also use find edges filter, then desaturate the image, adjust the black trianle towards the right to reduce the grey's in the image. you can then paint in the colors with the brush tool set to multiply, ( do the painting on a seperate layer ) you can select different parts from the black and white outline and use the paint bucket tool as well. as a final step you can but the image in illustrator and the brush tool again to do the black out line strokes. sorry to tell ya to get the results above your going to have to use freehand, especially for the hair.

Platinum, thank you, sir, for your ideas. I'll play around with them ... Ken

try to ad a little noise, just 1% will do. it's just a finishing touch, but it helped me lots of times.

Try maybe exporting to an auto-image tracer such as Corel Draw or Xara X. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. I think thats how your example was done. It's a vector, not a bitmap. An alternative quick outline function in PS is to copy the layer, and apply smart blur (edges only), then using overlay mode, set it to about 60-70% opacity. Again, not amazing, but far better than all those crap "define edges" filters.

to flatten out the graduations, i would start with playing with levels, on the layer, then levels on each of the channels. then you'd have to up the contrast, and add those dark outlines on certain edges. hmm, interesting :)