Self Portraiting. Well, this is it. This is my entry to the December 2009 Monthly Gargoyles Art Contest, which is the very last contest. Since it is the last one, they decided to let everyone pick from all the past contest themes. I ended up going with the "artists as Gargoyles" idea because I was always disappointed that I had missed that one. To draw myself as a Gargoyle, I had decided to draw myself drawing myself in a tribute to Norman Rockwell's classic self portrait, as seen HERE. The mirror I am looking into is a magic mirror from the Gargoyles television series, Titania's Mirror, thereby giving me an enchanted reflection. I went with goat-like horns on my Gargoyle simply because my astrology sign is Aries, the ram, so I figured that made about as much sense as anything. This was quite an ambitious project for me because it involved so many steps and procedures. First, I drew the sketch, then scanned that to my computer. Next, I inked my human and Gargoyle figures and scanned that. Then I touched up the inks in Adobe Photoshop 7. Then I imported the inked version into Corel Draw 11 where I created the art table, lamp, and mirror using basic shapes. The mirror was quite complex to make. I found a screencap of it and did the best I could at recreating the art deco style using rectangles and ovals, then turning that into a JPG, opening it in Corel Photo Paint 11 and manually erasing all of the excess lines (and boy, there were plenty of excess lines!). The mirror came out looking terrific, and almost 90% accurate to canon. The next step was to arrange all of the furniture and figures together so that they were to scale and fit. Then I imported my past contest entries and set them up around the table. Following that, I imported the sketch version of the drawing and cropped it down to just the Gargoyle face, flipped it and set it prominently on the art table. Next, I exported the whole thing as a large JPG to Adobe Photoshop 7, where I erased all the overlapping lines, retouched the inks, coloured it using layers, then flattened it and retouched the colours. I tell you, by the end, I was about ready to strangle this picture provided it had a windpipe. It was loads of work, and I'm not as happy with the result as I'd hoped I would be. I was really hoping it would "pop" but in the end it is relatively unremarkable. It doesn't really suck or anything, but I wanted it to be better for all the work I put in. Well, here's hoping I get some sort of honour/recognition in the competition!