The Chinese Vase (The Blue Lotus)
The Blue Lotus (French: Le Lotus bleu) is the fifth 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 August 1934 to October 1935 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1936. Continuing where the plot of the previous story, Cigars of the Pharaoh, left off, the story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are invited to China in the midst of the 1931 Japanese invasion, where he reveals the machinations of Japanese spies and uncovers a drug-smuggling ring.
– courtesy of Wikipedia
The finished model:
The story:
I confess. I have ALWAYS wanted one of these.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, The Blue Lotus is my favourite adventure. And, of all the iconic Tintin artifacts, the Chinese vase is one of the ones that really touches my heart. In fact, it was the first Tintin item – other than the albums themselves – that I went after… but never found it (at least not at a price I could afford). Whenever I visited a Tintin store… Tokyo… Singapore… Seoul… it was never in stock.
So, it should come as no surprise that I decided to build my own version. The question, of course, was which version would I do?
Generally speaking, the famous images that appear on the covers of Tintin albums, such as the the motorboat from The Black Island, the shark submarine from Red Rackham’s Treasure, and the Red Jeep CJ2A from Tintin in the Land of Black Gold, are more or less the same as they appear in the panels of the story. However, much like the black (on the cover) and yellow (in the story) Ford Model T from Tintin in the Congo, the Chinese vase on the cover of The Blue Lotus is quite different from the one on the inside.
It was a hard choice… I mean, I LOVE the cover of The Blue Lotus… but partially for the sake of consistency, I decided to go with the one from the panels. I guess I just think of the covers as a representation of the story, but what happens on the pages and in the panels IS the story.
The build:
I’m not really sure you could call this a BUILD per se. However, there was a few things that went into making the mini project come to life.
The first and foremost was modelling the correct shape of the vase. Luckily there is a very nice and easy to use side-view picture that provides just the right proportions. I guess it wasn’t much of a 3D modeling challenge, but getting the dimensions right was going to make or break this.
The other question is what to put ON the vase. The panels only provide a single side of the “kids with a dragon kite” image. Of course the official release of this figurine does have an image that goes all the way around the vase, but trying to reconstruct that image using photos taken of the curved surface, from several different angles, was no easy task. If this was any bigger than 1/72 scale you’d likely be able to see all the wrinkles.
After I got the vase printed and lightly wet-sanded, I dipped it in Future to get a nice smooth surface and a shine. I printed it using white resin, so I didn’t feel the need to try and paint it. As luck would have it though my small hand-made decal went on like a dream and wrapped around the vase like a nice warm hug – on the first try!
If you’d like to try your own hand and printing and building the Tintin Chinese vase scene, you can get a copy of my STL files here. You can use the coupon code: STROBEZ to get 50% off.
Here’s the image I cobbled together to use for the vase decal:
Anyway, as always, check out the build below and tell me what you think:
