SSAO is ok if tweaked carefully, and used sparingly. It would also allow you to reduce the lightmap resolution quite a bit. A nice thing to add to a stylized look is a rim effect, fresnel in the shader. Stylized fx is also neat. I made a painterly torch fire shader; the motion, color, and intensity adds a lot of visual…
Nice work and its one of the better organized Blogspot portfolios I've seen. Your game art work is all stylized and the prerendered stuff is a mix of both realistic and stylized. If it interests you and you want to work at a company that does more realistic game art I suggest making some! You've got the skills to do it!
Just so you know, that "cartoon" elf has very solid anatomy. The best stylized artists know that their anatomy still has to be ROCK SOLID for it to look good. So, make sure you understand anatomy first before you attempt stylized characters or they won't look as good as that elf you are using as an example.
This is supposed to be not a portfolio piece, but more of an test bed for the skills I recently upgraded .. Original Reference: First step is Asset Planning: