A bit over a month ago I was encouraged to participate in a contest that the @Adsactly community was organising. I looked at the story that was co-written by three authors - all of them from Nigeria - and immediately liked the middle section the most. It was written by @nevies a Steemit blogger that I already followed because of a bizarre and funny story about a boy that has to eat a mouse.
So I went ahead an found the best scene in the story, a scene where the obscure Professor Otagburuagu introduces himself. (You can see the digital painting and the lines that inspired it here: Professor Otagburuagu - my admission for the Steemshort #1 competition)
I really liked this strange pulp-fiction villain, so afterwards @Nevies and I talked about maybe doing a collaboration to let the Professor get a life of his own. Now go read Nevies's account of the whole thing (and vote for the post of course), because here I will instead write a bit about my initial digital paintings and drawings for the project.
The first Sketch
A thing that I have learned from making comics is that the most important thing when recognising a face is proportions. Most people will say that it is the nose or some other eye-catching feature of the face. But the height of the upper lip, the width of the mouth, and the space between the eyes is even more important. (I will make a more thorough post about this in connection with my The making of a comic-series)
When I initially created the professor there was not much to go on. Dark skin and shabby hair was the only words describing him - and as the skin-colour can not be seen in a drawing, the shabby hair has to do be an important feature. Funny enough my comic-hero Phill Philby has messy hair!
First try
Next I made this ink-drawing on top of the painting from the Adsactly contest.
On the original painting Oragburuagu is in dinner jacket attire. I let him have a bolo tie instead of the usual bow-tie that the corrupt politician sports - as a way of showing his eccentricity and disregard for convention. But in this new image I choose to let him have some Nigerian clothing as he is a practitioner occultism and of traditional dark arts.
I am not an expert in male Nigerian fashion - as always the women attracts most attention when it comes to attire, but after some goggling I could see that pearl necklaces and coloured shirts was pretty common. I decided that Otagburuagu should have a red necklace - the colour of blood.
Well... then I applied some colours...
I always use rather unsubtle colours (except sometimes i am subtle... pff, never mind) and when making a Nigerian pulp fiction super villain I don't see any reason to tone the colours down. The dark skin colour is always a challenge, as it lies very close to the ink lines, but the professor is dark, it says so in the text. And using some really cheap effect always helps.
Last I had the idea that the image would be improved by some cyan blue things in the corner - so I made some more research into the realm of Nigerian lore and found a very interesting thing. Nsibidi is an an ideographic script system that is somehow connected to secret societies, so I decided to use that on the left side. According to the internet it means war. On the right side I places, as a joke, a magic symbol that is even more important to the entrepreneurial Nigerians: the sign of the Naira - the Nigerian currency :)
In the comming weeks we'll see what @nevies comes up with. I look very much forward to this collaboration. I haven't talked to Nevies about the licensing, but maybe it will be a Creative commons license - we'll see what we can agree on.