I see no technical issues whatsoever

Hi Jacqueline, hi camw,

I’m not an Illustrator neither.

First: The illustration would be a great book cover. The use is quite limited, my company wouldn’t buy it. But I really love the idea behind.

If the Adobe moderator « does not like » the image, it would get a refusal because of commercial apeal. Also out of focus (the dagger) is not the refusal reason. That’s a distinctive one.

The writing may be a reason, but as it is part of a concept, I do not think that it would disturb anyone (well except my company... :-)

I have, however, identified some hard (in the right sense of the word) reasons for a technical error refusal:

The hard shadow borders really are flaws that were indroduced by the artist, probably during a correction phase.

In addition, the dagger may be a problem as the dagger’s tip is not as clean as it could or should be.

If this is a layered Photoshop picture, I think the flaws are easy to correct and you may try a resubmit. Please note, that I did not extensively look at the picture, so there may be still different other flaws of this type contained in the image.

that may be but it was not rejected for that reason. It was rejected for technical reasons, which there are none.

Quite frankly the broad and not specific reasons for rejecting work is completely useless to a contributor.