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Cigars of the Pharaoh: Colouring of Tintin's hand

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MrCutts
Member
#1 · Posted: 5 Nov 2006 01:37
When did somebody realise that on the cover, Tintin's left palm wasn't coloured up and decided it was a mistake and colour it pink?
My Tintin book from the 70's has his left palm white,yet on a recent poster I bought the left palm is now pink as it should be.

I presume the mistake was made originaly because his left palm does look like the bandages behind it.

Are there any more mistakes like this in the books?

Also, whilst I'm typing about the Cigars cover. When I was a kid I found it very odd that the faces weren't covered up on the mummies as they should have been. Did anyone else have that thought as a kid or was it just me? :o)
lintondrums
Member
#2 · Posted: 5 Nov 2006 20:04
"I found it very odd that the faces weren't covered up"

I am not too sure if there are any hiccups in the books but i can vaguely remember seeing a few.

As for the mummies, they were not made in ancient Egypt like you imagined them to be. These are just people that have been murdered and then wrapped up.

I must admit i can see your point though.....
MrCutts
Member
#3 · Posted: 6 Nov 2006 00:50
Gald you could see my point there lol

I think I was only about 5 or 6 at the time (many moons ago)and showed the cover to my Dad and asked him about the faces, he agreed with me that they should be covered up. I just saw them as mummies at that age.

Also is there not an error from the colouring point of view in one book where Haddock has a white jumper instead of blue. Someone forgot to colour it in?
Maybe I should pose this question as a seperate topic
lintondrums
Member
#4 · Posted: 8 Nov 2006 11:51
I am not too sure whether it was a mistake from herge or the people that published the book.
MrCutts
Member
#5 · Posted: 9 Nov 2006 02:17
I'm presuming Herge coloured up the cover, or might it have been done by someone else? Either way they missed out colouring the palm of his left hand. I was wondering if anyone knew when it was coloured in. Noone has answered my original first question as yet.
jock123
Moderator
#6 · Posted: 9 Nov 2006 09:52
MrCutts
I was wondering if anyone knew when it was coloured in. Noone has answered my original first question as yet.

Which I think, in itself, is an answer - it probably means nobody knows!
By the way, I would imagine that the colouring was done by a studio member rather than Hergé personally, but at what stage the error was made, and if it was always there, or if it crept in after a while and was then corrected I can’t say.
MrCutts
Member
#7 · Posted: 9 Nov 2006 10:20
It just seems odd with the way Herge worked as he was very much into detail that nobody noticed. Unless they did notice and it already gone to print. I wondered if it bugged him that it wasn't coloured up? Perhaps he didnt see it.

It's pointless speculating I guess. As Jock123 said 'Nobody knows'

I know that if it had been a piece of my artwork it would have bugged me for a little while. I've seen some of my artwork coloured up by other people and I've have had no control over the way they have coloured it up. I was horrifed at the results at first but after a while I learnt to live with it.
Balthazar
Moderator
#8 · Posted: 10 Nov 2006 10:28
One of the 'mistakes' someone claimed to have spotted is that Captain Haddock "sprouted a sixth finger on one hand" (in The Shooting Star, page 21, frame 10).
This isn't so. That's a misreading of the drawing, mistaking a palm line and the fat base of his thumb for the outline of a finger. As a cartoonist and illustrator myself, I'd say it's almost impossible to accidentally draw too many or too few fingers; that's just not the way your mind is working when you draw a hand. (And Hergé was especially good at hands and very particular about them.)

Mistakes in clothing continuity or colouring are much easier to make, I'd say.

MrCutts
Also is there not a 'hiccup' from the colouring point of view in one book where Haddock has a white jumper instead of blue. Someone forgot to colour it in?

Actually this one isn't a colouring mistake. I've seen that page in Benoit Peeter's World of Tintin book, and it's the first version of page one of Tintin and the Picaros, which originally had a summer Belgian countryside landscape. Before that page was ever published, it was realized that, as the story involves a Latin American carnival, it would have to be set in February and so page one had to be redrawn with a winter landscape. This was realized before the colouring on the original page had been completed. So Captain Haddock's jumper (and Tintin's jeans) weren't accidentally coloured white; they just hadn't been coloured in at all before the page was ditched.

It's an interesting page to look at though, to see the winter landscape we know from the book drawn in high summer. Not sure if it can be viewed on line anywhere.

I sympathize with you, MrCutts, having your artwork badly coloured by someone else. My advice would be to stick a clause in your contracts forbidding such unauthorized tampering, as the copyright law is firmly with you on such matters! (My bugbear is having my artwork digitally stretched or squashed out of proportion, but that's another topic!)
jock123
Moderator
#9 · Posted: 10 Nov 2006 11:30
Balthazar
As a cartoonist and illustrator myself, I'd say it's almost impossible to accidentally draw too many or too few fingers

While I agree entirely with you, and bow to your professional opinion, I have known it happen; I am old enough to remember an advert which ran in newspapers here in the UK during the early days of electronic pocket-calculators, showing a drawing of hand holding one manufacturer's product.

It had run for a while before someone spotted that the hand had in fact been given a sixth finger by mistake. When this was publicised on the BBC, with much hilarity over the inability of a calculator-maker to count fingers, the company offered to give a free calculator to anyone who could show that they had a sixth finger - a rare, but not unknown condition.

It sticks in my mind because I myself was born with a (vestigial) sixth finger on one hand, which was removed by the doctor in the first few days, so I couldn't claim a free calculator!
Balthazar
Moderator
#10 · Posted: 10 Nov 2006 12:04
Thanks Jock123. I'm happy to stand corrected in the case of your entertaining example. Clearly the artists who had to draw those hand-drawn product advertisments for a living could become bored enough to accidentally (or possibly mischeviously!) draw the wrong number of fingers.

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