Yeah, just used a soft brush and refined with a hard eraser, edge by edge. I usually do the AO layer right after my line art is clean enough to work with, though lately I've been doing my Flat Colors first — mostly to act as a mask for the AO so I don't have to keep erasing the same edges over and over.
Awesome. I feel like I learned a lot studying this - thank you so much for this!
No problem, I'm glad it proved helpful to someone!