The Mushrooms (The Shooting Star)
The Shooting Star (French: L’Étoile mystérieuseL’Étoile mystérieuse) is the tenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised daily in Le Soir, Belgium’s leading francophone newspaper, from October 1941 to May 1942 amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin, who travels with his dog Snowy and friend Captain Haddock aboard a scientific expedition to the Arctic Ocean on an international race to find a meteorite that has fallen to the Earth.
– courtesy of Wikipedia
The finished model:
The story:
As I’ve said before, as Tintin albums go, The Shooting Star is probably the one with my second favourite cover (Sorry, nothing comes close to The Blue Lotus!). I’m not entirely sure why, but there’s just something about that massive white/red mushroom that just grabs my attention.
Strangely enough, the mushrooms have a relatively minor role to play in the overall story though. Mainly they’re just there to demonstrate the strange properties of the meteor-island. It could have just as easily been a giant tree, giant apples, a giant moth or a giant spider.
But I’ll rely on Hergé’s expertise on visual design. The splotchy red on white mushroom casts a striking colour tone and an interesting visual. It’s no wonder it was chosen for the cover.
The build:
I have to admit though, I mainly chose to do this project because I had a 3D printed Tintin figure left over from my Arado Ar 196 project. 🙂
That figure was the first one I adapted from a pre-existing 3D model to create something wholly new. It’s not perfect, and there’s plenty of things I’d change now that I’m older and wiser, but basically, if you’ve got it, why not use it, right?
I made the mushrooms out of little bits of rolled up “angel clay” – basically a light weight fibrous “clay” made from paper pulp. Ingenious stuff that I’ve used many times before. What was interesting though, is just how hard it was to get those red splotches painted correctly. You’d think that red splotches on a white mushroom would be easy to paint, and you’d be right. But getting them to LOOK right… well, that’s harder than it… uhm… looks. There’s a certain balance between the contrasting red/white colours that needs to be respected. And the splotches themselves are far from random. They’re spaced out and rounded it just the right way.
Try it out for yourself and you’ll likely achieve what I did… a newfound respect for Hergé’s artistic ability. But, feel free to leave me a comment to tell me what you think!
