The Seven Crystal Balls

The Forbidden Planet International blog asked for drawings of favourite French comic characters, so I thought I'd have a go at a very un-ligne claire Tintin cover (yes, I know he's Belgian, but it's in French for heaven's sake). Seven Crystal Balls is a favourite of mine and contains one of the rare but brilliant spooky moments in Tintin's adventures when Rascar Capac, the Inca mummy, slips into the room of the sleeping boy reporter. I thought it might be fun to render the story as a gothic horror and Tintin as a grittier character. Using the Mignola Gothic-style covers as inspiration I took a few of the scribbles from the sheet below, pasted them together in Photoshop, printed them out as blueline and inked them up.

Actually the sheet below is the nearest I get to a sketchbook, I've never kept one and don't know what to do with them if I'm given one. There are three unpaid jobs on this sheet fighting for my attention, in the centre is a sketch for an article I've just written for Vworp Vworp! magazine about Mick McMahon's Junkyard Demon art (I'll post the final image at a later date) , on the left is as far as I got with my Absinthe Frappe image and the rest is Tintin scribble.