The Indigestible » Dot and Lionel

Kids’ Day 2008

Warren — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:52:22 +0000

The hospital here has an annual health fair called Kids’ Day, something attended by about 800+ kids and their families. There are interesting exhibits, lots of information from health vendors, and the kids can get their hearing and vision checked, as well as puppy shots. Given the rural setting, odds are pretty good that this is about the only exposure some of them get to medical treatment all year.

On the upside, there’s the collateral material promoting the event. This year’s poster was much more solidly colorful than last year’s was:

I’ve got the PDF too if you want to see it fullscale: Kids’ Day PDF, 950 KB

This began life, as do a lot of my drawings, as a blueline sketch that I inked and scanned, then colored in Illustrator. LivePaint is simply tha’ bomb. And since it’s vector you can scale the image up pretty much infinitely without losing detail or quality.

In addition to the main graphic I did a few “pictures” of Dot and Lionel to illustrate some of the highlights.

Clowns (PDF, 315 KB)

Fire trucks (PDF, 350 KB)

Helicopters (PDF, 465 KB)

Vision & hearing tests (PDF, 370 KB)

Hopefully the first image won’t disturb even the most colourophobic among the readership. (You can just Google that one yourself.) On the whole the Kids’ Day material is generally my favorite; only in my first year here did I end up using clip art. (I’d only been here for about two weeks at the time. My style takes some acquainting, and it was too soon right then, sigh.)

By contrast, this was last year’s main piece:

Kids’ Day 2007 (PDF, 1 MB)

It’s fun, but a little spare compared with the riotous exuberance of the balloony-inflated-people art for 2008.

Wonder what 2009 will look like…

Dot & Lionel’s Holiday Comic

Warren — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:14:32 +0000

As mentioned before, I’ve been busy — as in the case of this post. For the December newsletter at work I thought it would be a “fun” idea to make a comic insert featuring Dot and Lionel.

The sketching wasn’t the rough part; figuring out how to break up the actions was tougher. And the blueline and inking went OK too. Illustrator’s gap detection, though, was suboptimal in places; I had to add a lot of paths to get the fills to work, particularly on pages 3 and 4.

Still, I think the effect overall is pretty good. The JPEGs of the comic follow the fold, with a link to the PDF at the bottom. The PDF is imposed to print on an 11 x 17 tabloid sheet.

(Oh, in the bottom left image on page 2, the kids are shouting “Banzai!” I was going for an over-the-top manga-style look there.)

Dot and Lionel Christmas 07 PDF, 780 KB

Just Had To, Yeah.

Warren — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:49:34 +0000

Another Dot and Lionel toon.

It’s pretty clear Lionel’s me. Dot, though … she’s not anywhere near as innocent as you might think. I get the feeling she goes along voluntarily with her brother on his schemes, rather than being coerced; and she might even suggest refinements from time to time to improve on Lionel’s nefarious plans.

Anyway, something I tossed out last week below the fold.

Here’s the PDF if you want a cleaner-resolution version: D & L T’giving PDF

Some Things are Better Without the Kids

Warren — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:15:02 +0000

Our hospital is the largest private employer in the county with a staff of around 1300. That’s a lot of people — and a lot of families.

Each year we have a supervised gathering of staff kids so the adults can spend some time doing Christmas gift shopping. There are games, treats and so on, and parents get the chance to scoop up goodies without worry of being spied on or pestered to death.

For the flyer promoting the gathering this year I decided clipart just wasn’t going to do it, and fell back on pencil, ink and Illustrator. The results follow the fold. (This is just the graphical portion of the flyer; the info on where, when and so on I left off.)

I named the kids Dot and Lionel.

Poor Lionel. The only decent photo of him is the one in the Darth Vader suit.