More T-shirt Work

The main thrust of my time lately has been trying to get a design ready to submit to the large T-shirt company called Threadless. They have a very technically complex procedure for submitting designs. Designs are then voted on by the online public. Designs that get the most votes get printed, and the artists get paid.
Since I'm not sure of the process that Threadless uses to print shirts, I really have no idea whether my art can even be printed by Threadless. The design above is called, HARPY.

What kinds of designs will online,(adolescents mostly), respond to?  My guess is that exotic creatures will be more popular than North American species. I played around with this Keel-billed toucan painting to make it easier to be printed on a silk screen press. I may need to do this to all my designs. Threadless does not want captions on the designs.

Threadless also does not want photographs of designs. They want scans. This is a greatly reduced version of a scan of Carribea. My scanner can only handle a 9x12" painting. This painting was 12x24", so I just scanned part of it.
The scanner makes high resolution reproductions of paintings, 35 megapixels or so. Threadless wants them to be 250 kb or smaller.  That is to make them easier to upload to their website for voting. They want the original hi-res image if it gets chosen to be printed. Reduced images of scans are more digitized than photos. Scans must be easier to print on shirts.

Why spend all this time and effort with Threadless? Because there is nothing else going on in the art world right now. Winter is always completely dead around here. That is why I usually travel at this time of year. With the economy so down this year, it is not looking good for a trip this winter. A couple of designs getting accepted by Threadless would change all that.

This is a much simplified design to make it easy to print on a shirt. It is obviously meant to be on a child's shirt. My big technological challenge has been trying to figure out how to fit a design onto the Threadless t-shirt template. I wrote to them about the problem, and they e-mailed me a step by step procedure using Adobe Photoshop.
I only have an earlier version of Photoshop, and I dont know how to use it. It may not even be possible to follow the steps with it. So far, I can make no headway with it. Very frustrating.

Another painting that would not fit on the scanner. I made two seperate scans with it.  They look good as two different t-shirt designs.

This is the other half below. Which one looks better?

Another painting too big for the scanner. It probably looks better being cropped to the above proportions.

I cropped most of the scan of this bear alongside a waterfall. Will it look good on a dark shirt? I may make it even darker to add mystery.

I have many designs ready to go just as soon as I figure out how to layer the artwork onto the t-shirt template. This sun and moon is by far the strangest. Should I do more designs along the lines of this one? What do you think?