WATCHFRIENDS

Sunday, April 06, 2008

I've been Disqualified!

So the other night about midnight I got a wild hair and decided to enter a Worth1000 contest. Worth1000's name is based on the "A picture is worth a thousand words" idea. The website hosts fun Photoshop contests among other things.

The contest I decided to enter was about Counterfeit Art. The concept was to take a famous work of art and change it to make it obviously a fake. I did a quick Google search for famous works of art and settled on "St. George and the Dragon" by Raphael. Here's the original:



I'm not sure where my inspiration came from, but somehow, a Star Wars angle came into my head. I found a tauntaun image that I then pasted over the horse and made it look like it was part of the original painting. I then changed his sword into a lightsaber. Then I replaced the broken lance with broken pieces of C-3PO. I then realized it would be easy to turn the princess in the background into Princess Leia. And finally, I put a Rebel symbol on the side of St. George's helmet. All in all, I thought I did a pretty good job. Take a look.



So I submitted it to the contest and waited. A little while ago I got the following email:


There are certain type of entries we do not allow, either because they are potentially controversial, contain illegal material, contain overused items, contain non-photorealistic imagery, do not follow the contest rules or because they contain elements we consider lazy. The administrators felt that your entry fell into one (or more) of these categories and disqualified your entry. The specific reasoning for this note is the following:

Your entry contains Star Wars references.


Grumble grumble grrrrr....

Sure enough, on their FAQ page, they 'discourage' use of Star Wars imagery (among a bunch of other specific cliche'd items), but even still, it doesn't say anything about Star Wars leading straight to disqualification....

Oh well... I'm not going to modify this one to make it compliant, but I'll keep it in mind for next time...

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