Hiya jpin - are you still posting? I remembered this thread and I wondered whether to venture into asking for help as well ...
I tried adapting
this picture here into an avatar, just by making it smaller - but it becomes impossible to see what it actually is if you bring it back to 90 pixels wide. I tried using only a smaller selection of the picture, and then upping the contrast, for example, but none of that helped. You seem to be highly experted in this stuff though - do you see any way in which you could make it fit?