Hmm valid points about the choice of category. I don't feel the need to defend or justify myself, but perhaps if you know me a little better you too will be comfortable with my choice of noob.

Background:
I chose beginner because I am one, not in order to win. This challenge lies within.
I have less than a couple of weeks hands-on experience with a 3D application over a period of 6 months. No, I'm not a wizkid and never will be hehe. What you see is hard work that took me several hours to figure out and model, and several months to grasp basic concepts as shading and texturing which I know nearly nothing about still hehe. I model extremly slow because I do not yet know the "right" way of doing things. I have to start over several times before I get a decent mesh I'm happy with.
That's one of the reasons I'm in beginner category. It takes me a day to model something Mike does in 10 minutes hehe.

What you see in this thread is a direct result of what I've learned from watching the simplymaya.com video tutorials, a decent eye for what looks ok, an amount of imagination and creativity, and some sense of basic art concepts. And of course, still a lot of bad technique hehe.

If at a later time the result is in par with normal compo I have no problem with being bumped. At this point I think I could only dream of making the quality of the last challenge competitors. The results from normal were waaaay out of my league.

This said I encourage everyone in newbie category to dream up mindblowing concepts. Grand ideas are bigger than technique in my humble oppinion.