Sax Genie

Ever get the feeling you're trapped in a jazzy cigarette? This guy does. The title of this brief was simply 'Fashion Victim'. Before I received the brief, I had this doodle scribbled in my sketchpad while I was on the train.

You can see the cigarette was vaguely scribbled as an afterthought. When I looked though my sketchpad for ideas about fashion victims, I thought this guy could be useful. So I developed him a bit more.

So the concept was there but the zazz and style wasn't. He's clutching the sax instead of letting his fingers dance on it. And the flow motion isn't exaggerated enough. You can see that I started on making his head bigger. I came up with this, which I was way happier about.

He's a lot more in the moment, the flow of his smokey tail is getting there a bit more but can still be pushed. I was really happy with the hands here also, I took inspiration from James Hewitt's 'Gorillaz' Illustrations in that department.

So here's the first version of the final product. It's moody and cool, you can almost hear that breathy sax. The textures are working well, they add to the seediness that comes from living a cigarette. The stubble texture is a personal favorite of mine. I wasn't too sure about the ash tray, it was becoming too much of a feature in the image when really I just wanted a home for the cigarette. It was hard to see on its own. The tie's floating with the smoke rather than being stapled down to the shirt as well. The tail's got nice flow but it can be better. I looked back at the old Disney VHS's and wow, the animation on genie is insane. Just check out the way his slides and moves so smoothly like smoke.

Anyway, when I printed it out, I completely lost the contrast between the dark blue and the black, it just looked like little bit of light blue and white popping out of darkness. As a result, I made the background a healthy nicotine yellow. So here we have it, my sax genie, stuck in his jazzy cigarette for an eternity. Maybe someone will smoke him and they'll get three stinky wishes. 

Smoking kills, kids.