Cowboy Tintin (Tintin in America)
Tintin in America (French: Tintin en Amérique) is the third volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from September 1931 to October 1932 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions du Petit Vingtième in 1932. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy who travel to the United States, where Tintin reports on organised crime in Chicago. Pursuing a gangster across the country, he encounters a tribe of Blackfoot Native Americans before defeating the Chicago crime syndicate.
– courtesy of Wikipedia
The finished model:
The story:
Well, basically, I decided to expand (or is that contract?) the scope of my 1/72 scale Tintin project. At first I only saw the 3D printed 1/72 scale Tintin figures as a way to avoid the “flying ghost plane” syndrome of my early works. But, to be honest, I’m really amazed at how well they turned out. So, even though I’m still focused on building scale models of various modes of transportation that Tintin uses across his many adventures – there’s no rule that says I can’t have a few “non-transport” items in and around the edges, right?
Besides, Tintin in America, is one of the harder albums to squeeze content out of. Besides the Checker Taxi, the Steam Locomotive, the Red Truck, and Bobby Smiles’ Bugatti Type 37 – there’s just not that many vehicles to choose from, right?
The build:
OK, I’ll admit, it feels a bit like cheating. In this one in particular all I did was print off a 3D model of Tintin riding a horse… and painted it. Still, I think it looks pretty good, no?
So, even though there’s nothing much to talk about from an actual building perspective, painting such tiny figures is still a challenge. It’s so easy to make a giant mess of them.
Personally, the hardest part for me is the eyes. I don’t even use a brush… just the sharp end of a pair of very thin tweezers. But it’s often the make or break moment for the project. One dab of black paint and Tintin eye’s look totally out of scale and wreck the entire composition.
In this particular case, I also had the horse’s eyes to deal with. A bit easier, but still, trying to get the white paint to stay confined to the area wasn’t exactly easy. I did have to do a bit of softening around the edges with the brown paint afterwards.
Originally I had a thought to paint the hose brown and white like a real palomino cowboy steed. However, at this scale, that’s a LOT going on and it looked just a bit of a mess. In the album, Tintin rides a brown horse… so good enough for me. Feel free to tell me what you think though!
