The Making of An Award (or Three)

Nikki, over at This Genius is Insane has been giving out awards like  a Super Ninja Monkey recently, and I promised her something special.  Oh, I could just give her and award for giving out awards, but I thought I'd first make her (and all y'all) suffer a little and walk you through some of the creative process that I go into to award design.

The First award I ever gave Nikki was the O.B.A.M.A. (One Bad Ass Mother Award).  This is very similar to Candy's 'Bad Ass Mother Of The Year', but it was brown, as you can see, which matched Nikki's old blog template.  But she changed her template, so I dropped a purple filter on it and Bob's your uncle.  But, she lost the link and has been stuck with the brown one until now.  (Note: Awards have been resized to fit this page.  Please follow links for better copies.)

But then, I saw Nikki dropping awards on people like it was the Grammy's or something (seriously, a different Grammy for 'Album of the Year' and 'Record of the Year'?), so I knew I needed to re-award her for her generosity.  I was thinking 'awards ceremony' and a 'woman at microphone' and found this picture. It was OK, but I knew there was something better out there if I just looked hard enough.

Turns out I was wrong.  It wasn't 'out there' but 'in here' as in my PowerPoint's clipart library.  It's done in the same style as Sass's birthday card, but you can see the problem.  The red shirt would totally clash with Nikki's color scheme.  I was able to correct for that, but then it came to the font.  I wanted something that said 'celebration'.  That said 'winner'. I went with a 'Stars and Stripes' font, a little outlining and edging on the layers to set it off and POW.  Plus, I call Nikki my 'mistress'.  Don't you wish you had a hot 22 year old Ninja Monkey Mistress, too?

So, congratulations, on being named 'Mistress of Ceremonies'.  But I'm not done.  See, Google-ing 'Mistress of Ceremonies' led to 'Dominatrix' quicker than you can imagine.  (Well, may not YOU, we all know YOU'RE Google-ing habits).  I hit a couple of bits of art that I thought might work:

 

Chillie Willie got dumped pretty quick.  The 'Mistress' was a little too 'Low Res' for my needs, but 'Pinki' there had merit.  The halo & handcuffs.  Nice.  But since this was supposed to be Nikki, I knew I needed to work on the hair.  I tried to take it brown, but the best I could do was this, and the green wasn't working for me.  I really liked the black and white of the 'Mistress' and I suppose I could have tried to black and white 'Pinki' but there was one more picture to try.  Originally I wasn't sure about it, either.  Super sexy, for sure, but how was I going to incorporate that into an award.  What type of font would go with that?  Obviously something that kind of looked she's carved it out with the whip would be alright.  I settled on Chiller after discarding quiet a few.  Then It was time to take the text and  bend it like Beckham.  But I still needed a border.  I've over done the re-colored 'fire' outer glow on previous awards, so I thought I would echo the award she game me.  Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and I ended up with this: So, Nikki, two, two, two awards for you.  One kind of nice and sweet, and the other 110% bad ass.  I think they both fit you perfectly.

** Ooops, was wondering why I hadn't gotten any comments yet.  Turns out you need to hit the "Publish" button.  :-)  Gonna be one of those days.