text: So if you follow Jaguar on Facebook or any of their other social networking sites/blogs every couple of weeks they come out with a segment called “Great Drives.”
  These segments take you to various parts of the world & show you how wonderful their roads are for your Jaguar to grace. From Big Bend National Park, Texas to the winding back roads up in the Italian Mountains, Jaguar has got all the “Great Drives” in the world covered.
  I really like this idea & in my earlier posts I mentioned how cigarettes and cars have a lot of similarities in the sense that they go with a certain image of a person and their lifestyle.
  So my take on “Great Drives” would be to give our clients great places to smoke. Granted, most places in the world are no longer smoker-friendly and it is harder to find areas to sit down and enjoy a generic cigarette but an e-cigarette? That is a completely different story. It is an item that will let you get away with smoking virtually anywhere.
  So for the first segment of Marlboro Country we take you to the VMFA garden. This is just my first post for the segment so I hope to let this segment evolve & find more elaborate places. The VMFA is a good start and it is truly a lovely place to enjoy your clean Marlboro Sky e-cigarette.
  I know we are supposed to create something that involves the Marlboro Sky e-cigarette brand, but this one I felt was necessary to post…
  So I found this piece by Pablo Picasso & it features a woman wearing a blue scarf. I was immediately drawn to it because it features a few of the colors I would associate with the brand, namely, the blue in the scarf.
  After sitting down for a while & trying to figure out how I could use this image to relate to the brand I realized…the lady in the painting kind of resembles my dog.
  No I am not joking, my dog & this lady happen to wear similar fashions. So I decided to be-dazzle my dog with a scarf. I could not find a blue scarf so I decided to just use this red one. I know it isn’t the same color but it creates the same sort of effect.
  Alright, it is not spot on but I am sure you get the gist of it. My dog kept wiggling in dismay towards me, but put both images together and you have a very bizarre coincidence.
  I guess this painting was not as inspiring as I hoped it would have been. Also, now my dog hates me for wrapping her narrow head into a bonnet & propping her up like a human. Oh well, when it comes to this piece it’s as inspiring as I think it is going to get.
  While at the VMFA, not only did I arrive fashionably late & get heckled by security to leave my tea at the door, but I also did some meditating in the garden area. I was inspired by the little garden area that the VMFA has & I enjoy attending the yoga classes they have up there. I took a few moments to observe the garden and one thing that really struck a chord with me were the juxtaposing elements of the design. You had these free flowing elements, such as the plants and the water, confined to the square, minimal and precise design of the patio area.
  What really stuck with me was how the water flowed down the dark square stones. To be honest, all the square edges reminded me of cigarette packs and their boxy shape.
  I have yet to come up with a design for the Marlboro Sky e-cigarette box, I already have a design for the cigarette itself, but nothing yet for the box. So for my next project I decided to kind of make my own sort of art installation. In this case I wanted to show how the cigarette box evolves into it’s new elements of design.
  I start by showing the pack of cigarettes that is most synonymous with the brand. The square pack is being over taken by the new color it is about to become; black.
  The next installment shows the new pack, overtaken by the color, with two new colors melting over it. These new colors are the gold and blue in which I intend to be using in the design that I come up with.
  To create this set of images it actually took longer than one might think, I had two separate cigarette boxes. I had to paint on black and let it dry completely & then the tricky part was the lighting and the angles. I had to make sure the paint slowly fell off the boxes and flowed like the water in the garden.
  The cigarette boxes represent the flat planes & square design elements we saw in the garden. The colors of the paint melting on to the packs of cigarettes represents the more free flowing elements of the garden; the water and the plants. The plants and water, like the paint on the boxes, can grow & extend in any direction they wish to.