My daughter was a saxophone section leader in her high school marching band and wanted to create a T-shirt for the saxophone section.

Her starting reference was a skeletal marching figure from artwork associated with My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade. She liked the general character and movement, but wanted the final piece to feel specific to her own band: a saxophone player, wearing their marching uniform, and using the roll-step style they perform rather than the exaggerated high-step pose of the reference.

I used generative AI to explore that direction, supplying the original inspiration along with photographs of the band’s uniforms from multiple angles and detailed instructions around the pose, instrument, clothing, colors, and overall style.

After several iterations, the generated artwork arrived at a direction that felt right.

The overall composition worked, but the image still had many of the inconsistencies that come with generated raster artwork: stray color, overly complicated shapes, uneven repeated details, awkward intersections, and small artifacts that would not translate cleanly into a production graphic.

The next step was turning that concept into something usable.

I brought the image into Adobe Illustrator and used Image Trace to create an initial set of editable vector paths and color regions.

That provided a starting structure, but it was not the finished artwork.

From there, I went through the illustration manually and refined it extensively. Many shapes contained far more anchor points than necessary, so I simplified and redrew paths to produce cleaner curves and more deliberate geometry. Other elements were altered substantially or removed entirely.

I also:

simplified overly detailed areas

cleaned up stray shapes and color fragments

standardized repeated elements

corrected inconsistent linework and spacing

refined the saxophone and uniform details

simplified the musical notes and surrounding motion lines

improved negative space and silhouette clarity

reduced unnecessary complexity while preserving the character of the original concept

The goal was not to reproduce every irregularity in the generated image. It was to use the concept as a visual reference and turn it into a cleaner, more controlled illustration.

The final version retains the overall pose, energy, and personality of the generated concept, but the underlying artwork is substantially cleaner and more consistent.

The vector refinement also made the graphic resolution-independent and much better suited for reproduction at different sizes.

The finished illustration became the front graphic for the saxophone section’s T-shirt.

The back of the shirt used a simpler layout containing the students’ names, which I’ve omitted here for privacy.

What began as a personal project ultimately became a useful exercise in combining several different stages of visual production: