Check out the '7 soldiers of victory' 1st graphic novel spacemonkey. Theres a great new direction taken for the camelot knights, a good example of a reimagining of traditional fantasy characters. r.
I don't think there should be any issue with having started a model prior to the contest being announced, it is really just dumb luck. at this point i have a library of models on my hard drive that I usually pull from to do work. for example, if i want to model/sculpt a human head, i'm honestly not going to start the base…
I am pretty sure they are solid on 5kish, because if you check W.O.W. out its around that range, sure the terrain is done with height maps and is higher res, but the models are very very low. Here is what for example it says on the starcraft environment section on the first page of rules: "Please stay under 5000 polygons…