The Making of the Nigerian Blog Awards

Jul 18, 2011

If I've been somewhat scarce for the past few days it's because I was furiously trying to get thirty badges ready in time for the 2011 Nigerian Blog Awards.

I offered to do them in December last year and the original plan was to start months in advance so I could finish them all at a leisurely pace but a combination of procrastination and disaster made sure I was drawing right down to the last minute when the winners were announced on Twitter. After accidentally deleting my original sketches, (and crying a good deal about it too) I was drawing blanks on what to draw for each award. (Heh heh, pun intended). It didn't even help that some of the categories were really really hard to visualize (prime example - Most Inspiring. Grrr!! I hated that one). Time was running out so I did what every good artist does when they've come up short on ideas - recycle an old drawing.

Meet Emeka:

Emeka

I'm guessing now that the awards are over you've seen him around quite a bit huh?

Yeah you have:

Oh, and by the way, I named him Emeka because I have never met an Emeka in my life that didn't have a square head.

Emeka is a personal project that I'm still working on (he's not quite perfected yet) but he's a modification of the original "Little Yoruba Boy" drawing I did a while back. Basically he's a "dress-up" character I created and designed to star in a series of art projects that I'm still working on but I realised that he was perfect for the awards especially since the days were going by and there were still no badges.

Long story short, with a little (ok, may be a lot of ) modification, (and stress, and lack of sleep), bit by bit Emeka became the badges.