Mind the Gap (Prisoners of the Sun)

Prisoners of the Sun (French: Le Temple du Soleil) is the fourteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised weekly in the newly established Tintin magazine from September 1946 to April 1948. Completing an arc begun in The Seven Crystal Balls, the story tells of young reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and friend Captain Haddock as they continue their efforts to rescue the kidnapped Professor Calculus by travelling through Andean villages, mountains, and rain forests, before finding a hidden Inca civilisation.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The video:

This is Tintin project : 053

This project was originally completed on 2025/09/08

The story:

When I first started working on my 1/72 scale Tintin Project I was a little worried about Prisoners of the Sun. That’s mainly because there aren’t that many vehicles or other modes of transportation featured in the album. However, as time’s gone on and I’ve moved away from featuring “ghost planes, trains and automobiles” and into more of a diorama format… well, opportunities have presented themselves.

This one, for example, more or less fell in my lap. After someone posted a great Tintin climbing the rope model on Cults3d.com, this project more or less sprung forth fully formed in my head.

The build:

Like most of my Tintin “side dish” projects, there’s nothing much to talk about from an actual building perspective. I did modify the the Tintin model ever so slightly – mainly just tweaking the head and the feet to bring it more in-line with the rest of my cast print models.

The bigger challenge was creating a waterfall?  With limited space, I knew I needed to be be very economical on how I presented it… but it also needed to look like a waterfall.

In the end I went to my “tried and true” process of using a bit of acrylic paint in transparent silicone. Because of the vertical nature of the presentation, I had to first lay it flat using a plastic lid as a mould. Then I quickly “brushed” (using a toothpick) some lines into it to represent the falling water. Finally, after it was dry, I added a tiny bit of silicone to the bottom and carefully bent it around the curve of my standard “chopstick stand” wooden base. After that I use a tiny bit more silicone to fasten two bits of clear plastic rod into the waterfall, and strung a bit of thread between them for the rope.

I’m not sure I was 100% happy with the paint job I did. Tintin is in an awkward pose to be able to paint properly, but good enough is good enough sometimes. Feel free to tell me what you think though!