Toon shader

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This was a 2-week project where I explored how to code a shader myself. I chose a pretty straightforward shader to start with, which was a toon shader (Figure 1). After some tutorials and researching, I had a pretty good grasp of the basics of writing shaders. So once the toon shader was finished I started experimenting on it. I myself am not too fond of toon shaders' hard edges, so I experimented to get a small lerp between the hard edges, but small enough so you can still see the edges (Figure 2).
Afterward, I just tried some other things like giving the whole object a gradient together with the hard-edged toon shader (Figure 3), and also with the softer-edged toon shader (Figure 4).

Since I've got normal lighting under control (except for shadows), I implemented normal mapping as the final addition (Figure 5). 

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The final result I was very happy with, was a unique style of shading, and I got to know the basics of shaders.