Troy boy, 11, is state finalist in Google contest

An 11-year-old boy from Troy came one step closer last week to having his artwork appear on Google, when a drawing he rendered in colored pencil was announced as Montana’s winning entry in the annual Doodle 4 Google competition.

Nathanael Botes’ “Lessons From Ants” was among 53 state and territory winners of the contest, in which K-12 students nationwide were asked to redesign the Google logo guided by the theme “What inspires me?”

Botes, a home-schooled fifth-grader, found out he won on Thursday, May 3, when representatives from Google appeared at an open house at the Libby Seventh-day Adventist Christian School.

He was “shocked” at winning.

“I saw all these people wearing Google shirts,” Botes said. When they announced the winner was in the room, he said he looked around in surprise, wondering who else it might have been.

It wasn’t until they revealed a clue about the winner — his love of origami — that Botes realized his drawing had won.

“Nathanael strives for perfection in his art work and always has a reason or inspiration behind what he does,” Lelia Mercill, home school facilitator for Libby Adventist Christian School, said via email. “Much of it is based on what something will mean to someone else in a helpful way. He loves drawing and origami, and enjoys making things for others.”

Botes said he originally considered doing a drawing about space, after reviewing winning entries from previous years, but settled on ants after being inspired by Proverbs 6:6: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”

“I thought I’d definitely do something with ants, because they can do anything,” he said, noting how they work together to accomplish tasks that greatly outsize the individual ant.

In Botes’ drawing, a crane forms the first G in Google, followed by a doughnut and the sun as the Os, two trees as the second G, Botes himself as the L, and a flying bee as the E.

In a case of life imitating art, Botes himself showed the industriousness of an ant in his drawing. Not only did the doughnut alone take about 20 tries to get just right, he said, but he didn’t find out about the contest until the Monday before the deadline, when his mother Renette discovered it while using the Google search engine.

The Google people presented Botes with a Chromebook laptop computer, as well as a T-shirt, canvas bag, certificate, wall plaque and wall hanging, all displaying his drawing.

The next step in the contest is a nationwide online public vote for five national finalists at doodle4google.com. Voting opened Monday and will last two weeks. The five national finalists and the final winner chosen from among them will be announced in June, and on that day an animated version of the winning doodle will go live on Google.com.

According to Google, the winner will be awarded a $30,000 college scholarship, and his or her school will receive a $50,000 Google for Education grant to apply toward a computer lab or technology program.

Though college is still some years away for Botes, he said he wants to learn about plants and essential oils and to become a missionary.