Finally an update. I've been hell busy at work, and struggling to save some time for my model. Only a few days left
Anyways, got the head/body shell done. Took me days to figure out how to get the trimmed edges smoothly rounding inwards. Eventually I had to Loft a few curves from the trimmed edges to get the best result.

The clips that will hold the pencils and stuff, pop out a door at the back and slide in position (all individually animatable).

Tried many (I say MANY!!) different eyes, but end up with these human like eyes but with a circuit board in the iris (individually fully animatable).

The textures are still in draft and I still need to put it in a scene and animate it. But since the whole character is rigged for animation, it wouldn't take much effort to get it to do something nice quickly.
Just worried about rendering time.