Camel Riders (The Crab with the Golden Claws)

The Crab with the Golden Claws (French: Le Crabe aux pinces d’or) is the ninth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in Le Soir Jeunesse, the children’s supplement to Le Soir, Belgium’s leading francophone newspaper, from October 1940 to October 1941 amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. Partway through serialisation, Le Soir Jeunesse was cancelled and the story began to be serialised daily in the pages of Le Soir. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to Morocco to pursue a gang of international opium smugglers.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The video:

This is Tintin project : 057

This project was originally completed on 2025/12/27

The story:

I bet when most people think of The Crab with the Golden Claws, the first thing that comes to mind is that cover. While it’s not one of my absolute favourites, I still think it’s striking with that large swath of blue sitting over the equally large swath of sandy beige.

So, of course I wanted to include yet another icon scene into my Tintin project, right?

However, I do have a few loose rules (basically until I decide to break them) and one of them is not to depict the covers directly.

So, like the Model T in Tintin in the Congo, the amazing Chinese Vase on the cover of The Blue Lotus, the Dugout Canoe from The Broken Ear, the Motorboat of The Black Island, and a few others, all inspiration was taken from the interior artwork rather than the cover. There’s usually no real reason for it other than to maintain some kind of consistency, and in this case it’s not a huge difference, and mostly just a few subtle painting choices.

However, have you ever noticed on the cover that the camel’s eye is blue? For some strange reason it’s always bugged me. I think it probably was originally just a misprint – after all, I don’t know a lot about camels but I don’t think many of them are blue-eyed – but the reverence for keeping all things Hergé untouched now seems to have cemented it in place given the numerous re-printings and digital editions.

Luckily, my rule means I don’t have to worry about any blue-eyed camels, because they look normal in the interior pages.

The build:

As with most of my mini “side” projects, the story of the work is mostly done in the 3D modelling stage using Blender and not in the assemble. I was able to find a useable camel model online that only needed a few adaptations to bring it closer to the page. One thing that was new though was this was my first attempt at using Blender’s physics to create the cloth parts. That was a bit of a learning curve and even though it isn’t 100% page accurate, I’m pleased with what I was able to accomplish.

The other tricky part was getting these to print properly. Living in Canada in the winter made me realize that the temperature in my basement was dipping below the 20-25C temperature, so I had to invest in a 3D printer heating unit. I had a thought to go with a cheaper option, but the thought of explaining to my wife why our house burned down in the middle of December didn’t appeal to me, so I went with the more expensive option that had a thermostat regulator and an auto shut-off function.

I still had a bit of trouble with the camels heads, so instead of just re-printing them for a third time, I decided to do a bit of surgery on them and swap a few heads around. I’m not going to tell you where the seams are though, you can probably still tell, but I hope not.

Feel free to let me know if you do!