choumore wrote:Anyone cares to enlighten me what went wrong this time?
Don't tell me it is the thumbnail again...This is the best I can manage. And I thought its children's book kind of illustration style would catch some eyes.
Since you asked me similar in another thread, I'll give you some thoughts here.
I think that part of it is the theme (the big line up the top of the shirt reads "exhaust trail of airplane" to me, but it's very minor, and does have the chance of looking like nothing but a big line of ink). Without an obvious link, some people might not be really having it resonate.
Past that, I think some of how things are anchored is an issue... odd placements are always iffy at woot, but more than the weight being mostly on the belly, I think that the boy looking like he's just floating in the middle of nowhere is a bit confusing, but then so too is the Toadstool-looking house in the distance. I feel like it might have some perspective issues as well which might be an issue (the way the "roof" looks, ie, and maybe even perceived distance from the kid).
One big thing, though, could be that people simply don't resonate as well as focal points as other objects to. I think this is frequently the case, to be honest, as we are people, and we have our own aesthetic tastes in people more so than in, say, cats or rabbits or squirrels. I personally find kids repulsive (I'm sure this is no revelation to regulars around here) and so I'd need a lot more than just a kid to make something like that purchasable. Many of the most successful "people shirts" either rely on parody and skilled enough execution to make the person in question obvious ("Who Wants to Live Forever," perhaps), have the people as almost a background or extra element, and keeps them subdued as imagery (tgentry's long reckoned "Watch it Grow" could show this) or else be so stylized as to make the "peopleness" of the people less important (note Walmazan's style). I think the biggest issue, though, is faces. This is why characters like Death can still get through, or why toy-like creations are OK... if a human representation is too real looking, you need emotion in them, and emotion is not easy to convey, especially if you're going for realism. In your case, of course, it could just be a lack of eyes.
All in all, though, it's hard to say why some pieces get attention and others don't. Here, what I'm seeing is a difficult to grasp scenario in an odd position, with a long white dash which is doing no compositional favors. It's not horrible (the style definitely has some whimsy, and is worth honing to see where you can take it), but it's also not too memorable. And sometimes that's worse for success than being flat out awful.
