I love dragons!

My mother's Welsh, a pure-blooded Celt, and as you well might know, Arthurian legends take seed in Celtic lore. Also, the country's official flag is a red dragon on a white/green background which I have proudly displayed as a curtain to my entrance door.

Needless to say, I'm gaga over dragons, but ever since I decided on taking graphic design next September, I've discovered how strict copyright laws are. I simply cannot leech images off someone's else's website and use them to my convenience. Some are public domain, but these are rather hard to find.

This applies especially to dragons because they obviously can't be photographed (duh). They need to be drawn or painted, and artists are much more reluctant than photographers in leaving their images up for public domain.

In any case, I have lots of dragon figurines I've acquired over the years, and my father is up for visit. He brought his digital camera, so I took various pics of the knick-knacks around my house, and I'd like to receive feedback on the following:

This is the before picture:


And this is the after:


Basically, what I'm trying to do is render those lardass dragons a little more cartoony, and I'm not really satisfied with my result. Didn't try really hard, just duplicated the layer in Overlay mode, and applied Gaussian blur to make the sculpture's edges less defined. I also played around with the hue/saturation, but that's about it.

Anyone have suggestions? That also includes potential repositioning of the figurine to make for a better photograph.