Cigars of the Pharaoh: Colouring of Tintin's hand

Balthazar
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,

Yep, I realised about hour after I typed that it was from that book, D'oh! :) I was going to type a post saying I had realised but didn't want post straight after my first one.

Balthazar
I sympathize with you, MrCutts, having your artwork badly coloured by someone else.

Thanks Baltazar, nice to have a fellow illustrator on side. I did some kids books some time agao and because the colouring up was complicated and involved using Eyecandy filters (that I didnt have at the time) the publisher got his designers at his printing firm to colour up my black and white artwork. I wasn't impressed but had little choice.

Typing about fingers in artwork. Balthazar is correct in that I've never drawn one too many fingers. Most of my cartoons have four fingers, although I recently did a mascot for a French firm and drew it with four fingers and they asked me to draw it with five. I guess when you look at most French comic strips the cartoon people have five fingers or technically four and a thumb ie: Lucky Luke, Asterix.

I think the four finger route must have been an American thing, but cannot say for sure.

MrCutts
I think the four finger route must have been an American thing

Yes, maybe. Certainly Mickey Mouse famously has only four fingers on each hand. Walt Disney gave some jokey explanation that, over all the thousands of drawings necessary to make an animated cartoon, skipping a finger added up to a huge saving in ink and drawing time. However, since Walt Disney was a producer rather than an animator or artist (his employee Ub Iwerks created the original visual image of Mickey Mouse) this explanation may be less than accurate. I think a simpler four-fingered hand like Mickey's was considered to "read" more easily for the cinema audience in early animations. Or it could have been just a fashionable stylization for cute animal characters - most of Disney's human characters have five fingers. And maybe the practice precedes Mickey.

Personally, I prefer five fingers in comic strip characters. It depends on style of course, and I can think of four-fingered exceptions I like, but generally I prefer a more deadpan, life-drawn-based style of cartooning. Maybe it's because I grew up reading Tintin!

Smurfs have the four finger approach. I think maybe four fingers equals cuteness. I like almost anything cartoony. I'm no good at technical drawing so I really amire the way Herge and his collaborators drew.

Anyway I digress...there are some more Tintin errors
here

*********

that link (BB code) didn't work but the website is there to copy n paste - oops!

--
[Moderator action: combined two consecutive posts.]
Moderator note: Link fixed! Remember, you can edit your posts and fix links for up to 48 hours after you've posted, so there's no need to make consecutive posts. Please refer to our user guide for more information about editing posts and using BB-codes.

That's an interesting site, though if you check it out (click on Tintin Quiz's link) you'll see that one of the 'mistakes' they claim to have spotted is that Captain Haddock has "sprouted a sixth finger on one hand". 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.

I see your point. The two lines would be the crease at the base of the fingers and the curved palm crease. But even keeping your message in mind, it still looks like six fingers!
See a blow up of the image.

Defintely looks like four fingers and a thumb to me.

I would have to agree with Tintinrulz . It's four fingers and a thumb. I can see how someone thought it was six fingers though. It's kinda like an optical illusion.

Refering to Yamilah's post, the posters have Tintin's left palm as white, (my poster has a white left palm) yet the cover has now changed (we don't know when) and his left palm is now pink. I think the mistake arose because the line of the palm of the hand and the line of the bandage behind seem to carry on as one line so someone probably thought 'Hey I better leave that (the palm) white' thinking it was the bandage.

From what I can gather from these Tintin error websites they deal with mistakes within the books.The error with the hand on the Cigars cover must be the only error on all of the covers.