Tintin Forums

We all know that Hergé used the style which became known as "clear line" (ligne claire, in the French). This explains the single lines and blocks of plain colours throughout the drawings, and the complete lack of shading, toning, shadows and other such artistic textures.

However, have you noticed the cheeks of many of the characters, especially Tintin himself? There's the faintest splodge of additional toning - almost orange in colour - , it seems, adding to the 3-dimensional effect of the characters faces, and adding life to their visual features and facial expressions.

Given Hergé's style and the complete lack of such additional textures except on the cheeks, what's your view on this? It surely has nothing to do with the printing process of the albums. Has anyone delved extensively into Hergé's artwork and style and creative process and come across anything to do with this?

Forever curious about this one, that's for sure. Perhaps Hergé was just making the one exception?

We've touched on this before, but basically it's a bit of a nonsense to say that Hergé worked in any specific style.
Joost Swart coined the term "ligne claire" in 1977, after the last completed Tintin book had been published, and while his definition covers some of the aspects of Hergé's style, it also ignores or leaves out a lot of what Hergé did over the course of a fairly long career, and none of Hergé's work really adheres to Swart's post facto "rules".

For example, Hergé did use shading and hatching - from cross hatching on the suits of Haddock and the Detectives in many of the early books (to define where the characters' arms were), to subtly painted shadows beneath characters in Crab, to the night walk through the forest to the gypsy encampment in Emerald, where the shadows are inked in. He continued to hatch dark shadows beneath cars for the whole of his career.

He didn't use a constant line weight, as Swart says clear line should, but varied it considerably, depending on the effect he was looking for - thus Snowy is almost always given a lighter stroke than Tintin; this was to give the little dog a fuzzy, furry look, and is also found on the bear cubs in Destination Moon.

He also used colour modelling as you describe - not just on Tintin's cheeks, but for his hair (which is only shown in the colour scheme, not in the line art), and often had an air-brush effect to vary flat colour: the under-water sequence in Red Rackham's Treasure is probably the most extensive, but you'll find it in the way the parabolic reflectors are made to look metallic in Calculus Affair, and as late as Picaros, where the abstract Henry Moore-inspired statue is given incomplete black lines, and is in fact mostly given definition by gradation of colour.

So the short answer is that while the clear line defintion as proposed by Swart may be an idealised scheme which reflects much of Hergé's technique, and a simplified expression encapsulating some generalized observations of what he did, it is in fact not a proposition of the actual method Hergé used, nor is it right or useful to suggest that Hergé would have wanted to be constrained by having to abide by it.

Thanks for your reply, it was most informative!
Update: Actually, have just noticed another example particularly on pages 48 and 49 of Prisoners of the Sun. The feathers worn by the Inca and those decorating his throne have gradual toning. So, it makes all the more sense what you have said.