here's my 2 cents: you said that you could draw these things up yourself right? wouldn't it give you a greater sense of accomplishment to do that rather than rip off wotc?
and here's a thought: your mod could very well be construed as a way to help boost sales for dom3, whether it is what you intend or not, this sort of scenario results in profits for dom3 with wotc created material and they won't ever see a red cent of it.
Drawing units like these would take many hours. Our vanilla mod will need approx. ~200 + 200 = 400 sprites for the new units. Just calculate how much time would it take to draw those. I would say it would be impossible, since we cannot do this all day long. In fact I cannot do it, since only I am good in photoshop in the team. Anyways like many people have pointed out, I doubt that anyone would care if we would use these images, or if they would, the maximum what could happen is, that they would send an e-mail that we shouldn't use these images. If they do, we replace the images with in-game unit images. They never cared that everyone used up these images in countless game modifications, why should they care about this mod?
"Training is principally an act of faith. The athlete must believe in its efficacy: he must believe that through training he will become fitter and stronger, that by constant repetition of the same movements he will become more skillful."
I was playing around with non miniature images. Take a look at this orc with a sword. [You won't see too much from the sword & his black leather armor, because they are almost black, but not 0,0,0]
It is also not complete, this was just a quick test.
I think that unit gfx like this could also work perfectly.
"Training is principally an act of faith. The athlete must believe in its efficacy: he must believe that through training he will become fitter and stronger, that by constant repetition of the same movements he will become more skillful."