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)

Here is a fast pencil sketch made to fit the original image of Professor Otagburuago. I will mainly use id for measuring and comparison until I get the hang of the professor.

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 had a feeling that colours was cheating because it is so easy. I tend to forget the endless hours before the canvas...

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.

Gradients to the rescue!

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 :)

I changed the contrasts to make the face of Otagburuagu more visible.

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.

If you haven't already go read Nevies's account of the whole thing (and vote for his post of course)