Finished product

And here it is. "The thing I try to do in my work," Stolte says, "is I really like to get it to look as hands-on as possible. But if you look at it carefully, you realize there's no way that it could actually be done by hand--just in the way, say, the pencil work is sitting on top of other elements...As far as my process goes, I start with a pencil sketch and from there I bring it into the computer and I work with a graphics tablet to paint and color in Photoshop. And I have a big library of found photography and paper textures and fabric textures and things like that, that I use to sort of create the feel of a physical collage on a sheet lying underneath these pencil marks."

In this case, we can see that--surprise!--our famous lime slice, from slide 15, sits beneath the pencil marks in exactly the way Stolte has described. There's a great anecdote about this lime--about this little detail that lends the work a uniquely personal touch, an up-to-the-minute connection with the audience, and that shows the resourcefulness of a designer who's thinking on his feet.

"I had planned on doing this illustration," Stolte says, "and I worked it out beforehand. And as I was getting ready to be called up onstage--they had already called up the first three people, and I was the fourth one to come up and take my seat. And I look over to my left, and somebody had left a drink there with a lime sitting in it, and I grabbed it. I said, you know, 'I could use this' [laughs] and I brought it up on stage with me and shot it as part of my illustration, on the fly."

(For a pictorial overview of the tournament, see our related gallery, "Digital designers duke it out at Cut&Paste." And you can check out our introduction here.)