Something a little bit different, today- and a return (after quite a while) to cartoon illustration for me (Ben). I've not even done a comic for the model blog in a year, let alone anything more professional, but a chance arose to do some drawing for work.
This is Hal...
...and this is Hallie. Which is Hal in a wig with different clothes, though it's amazing how even a Robo-Child like this can have a different personality depending on the clothes and wig.
A Robo-Child, you ask? Ah yes, medical robots, or High Fidelity Patient Simulators if you will. I work as a medical technician, and my day job is operating and maintaining these robots (and the adults, and babies, and the pregnant lady-bot, and more). Hallie is awesome, and our most advanced robot in terms of Human Factors. She blinks, cries, changes her facial expression, turns and looks by herself, tracks movements, you name it. Short of getting out of bed and wandering around, there's not a lot she can't do, and it's as like having a real child patient as you can get for training.
We regularly get called on to do big, prop-heavy children's wards and bedrooms as settings for training, however management told us we needed to downsize what we had stored. This was an issue, and we needed something that didn't take up much room but filled the space somewhat.
Inspiration struck whilst helping with a course over in the Maternity block, and this rather fun wall mural at the entrance. I reasoned I could do something inspired by this, removable for when the bed space has to be turned back into an adult ward.
Starting point was a few days drawing random, vaguely kid-related stuff.- simple line drawings in pencil, then gone over with fineliners. But it really needed something a bit more humanising.
The neonates murals had two characters which appeared throughout the pics, one boy, one girl.
As it happens, all my robots make appearances in doodles throughout my notebook. Fairly quick and crude sketches, to be fair, but I've been working on some slightly better designs as we reckon there could be some mileage with including Hallie in the comic over on the model blog.
...some experiments with how to make her look a bit more stylised (not least because technically the NHS own anything creative I do for them, so if I ever wanted to owt with the Hallie character, I needed a more distinct version of her for this).
I worked out a pencil sketch of a stylised version of Hal...
...and Hallie.
After doing some pencil sketches in different poses, I realised it worked better if the kids were in broadly similar poses each time. So I photocopied the sketches with them standing head-on...
...and inked some pics over the top. This is pre-scanning and tidying in photoshop.
I did quite a wide variety of sketches, with different activities, trying to ignore gender stereotyping too. They both do active stuff, they both have teddies (both Hal and Hallie are meant to represent kids between 3-6 years old).
One for the hospital's intenal mag (running joke for our team; the only way to get pics published is to have people standing in a line, smiling, nurses, and balloons somewhere in shot. Hallie nails two of the four).
After various experiments, I settled on a pastel colour pallette, and a slightly faded, blurred effect for the characters (more pronounced with the toys in the background). One Hal, and one Hallie, per panel.
Someone commented on how all the toys in the pics are a bit battered and broken; teddies with rips, patched inflatables, and so on. But then all the stuff we get donated as props tends to be past its best and patched back up. Plus, real kids break toys, so why not.
Enough panels were produced to wrap as a banner around one of the bed spaces, with the colours fading into one another.
We had a few days where we needed to demo and show-off the Sim Centre for visitors, so it was time to test it out before rolling it out on some courses in the Autumn.
Hallie went blonde for the occasion.
It really needs to be attached to the wall a bit better, but as a quick test, it seems to work just with a little blue tak.
The rest of the set dressing helps a bit, and show the new regime of minimising storage. The giant unicorn teddy is actually a multi-purpose prop, as it has been surgically modified to hide a microphone. The big teddy is 'hers' and lives with her on her bunk bed in the cupboard (we're soppy like that, it seemed wrong Hal/Hallie not having a favourite toy), the other soft toys are temporarily there, being disposable effectively. The balloons are re-usable and everything else stores flat apart from the flowers.
In the wider scene, it really works, and is subtle enough to not distract. Really happy with it, anyway. Just need to find a publisher now for "The Adventures of Hallie; Robot Girl From The FUTURE!".
