rglee129 wrote:Thanks for the praise in general. I admire your work, too.
As far as using photos in this design- it's not the use of ripping other people's photos we see so often in shirt design. For example, the city came from photos I took of downtown Memphis a couple of years ago.
I lifted sections of different buildings that were square to me and distorted them using one point perspective. The potatoes are a lot less manipulated, but took forever to get just right. I lined up a bunch of potatoes this morning in stark daylight, in ambient room light, etc., for the spuds in the design. Then I had to paint over some of the darker areas and then render them both using high contrast and then a second time using halftones to get the look I got. It took a lot longer then drawing and shading the robot!
Anyways, I hope I'm not coming across as defensive- I just want to be clear that this is really a laborious assemblage of heavily manipulated parts of original photos, and not just livetracing someone else's photographs and calling it my design. Sometimes it's just cooler looking and more effective to use this method, especially in combination with hand drawn stuff. Hopefully woot sees it that way, too.
I actually like the incorporation of photos into a design when done well, which I think you did here, but Woot really doesn't like photos whether you took them or not 
I don't think your trying any shinanigans, they just use that rule as a blanket to keep a bunch of photo only pieces cropping into every derby. Hope the best for you though, keep it up you do great work 
