The Fanta Fantam.
Agency work is so fickle. Sure it pays the bills and for that I am thankful, but agency work often falls under the category of "Creative Exploration" and that is at best an artistic gamble. Even when you do a good job someone down the line decides they'd rather go in another direction so what you've done is no longer needed. Because of that you miss out on designing or illustrating the end product and miss out on the satisfaction of seeing your art in a campaign.
The agency for Fanta pop (Yes, I call it pop not soda.) hired me to develop a character for an idea they had pitched called the "Fanta Fantam." Fanta asked that the character be more in tune with Halloween so they left the specifics up to me.
My daughters idea.
As I worked on this my 10 yrs old daughter came into my studio and asked what I was doing, I told her about it and she asked if she could draw something for me. I said sure and when she showed me her pencil sketch later that night I was really surprised at how well she had done so much so I played off her sketch and told her if they went for it I'd give her a cut of what they paid me.
So I sent the agency a couple options. One of them playing off my daughters idea shown above. The final art as shown above uses the same head as the one I drew from my daughters sketch.
Over the next few days my daughter would ask me if they had made up their mind yet and unfortunately today I had to tell her they decided to go in another direction with the campaign, so they no longer needed our Fantam character. I could tell she was a little bummed out after I told her the news and I couldn't blame her because I was as well.
Instead of letting the character sketch be filed away in my project folder and forgotten, I decided to go ahead and finalize the art so I could show my daughter what it could have been. The above character is the end result.
