Some of my inspiration came from American Gods. The rest was just conjured up as I looked over different pictures of genies and the like. Combining these two concepts amused me and I wanted to have the image tell a story of sorts.

Mechanically, I began the process in Daz3D with just the characters. Modifying them considerably, I went through many iterations to get the characters the way I wanted. I went through 15 different render layers to get the assets I wanted in order to put the image together. When they were ready and I was able to put them into Photoshop, I did some clean up to ensure it met with the concept in my head. Once they were in the right position and the lighting took my fancy, I moved on to some color correction and a little modification of the characters and scenes.

This involved several different actions I had setup and a bunch of adjustment layers. My first attempt made it look like winter so I had to go back and start again to give it a more ambiguous appearance. 

Time spent:

Scene Setup: 5 hours

Renders: 36 hours

Photoshop Part 1: 6 hours

Photoshop Part 2: 4 hours

Grand total: 51 hours start to finish.