My friend was actually looking for a specific image of Tintin when he wrote me. He sent me a description but once I decided to do a Tintin painting I didn’t refer back to it.

“It was Tintin at 40 years old or so, trench coat, galloise cigarette drooping, balding, hard-eyed and hard-boiled. It was an amazing image that made me what to know what he’d gotten into that had crushed his boyhood optimism and embittered him.”

Dang. Sounds like there’s another painting of Tintin to be done down the line.

When I originally planned the painting I thought I’d add skin and hair colors in Photoshop. I only got to the hair before I decided to stop. I think even adding the hair color might have been a mistake.

A friend wrote to me recently asking if I’d ever done a drawing of Tintin as a burned out middle aged man. I’ve done a few sketches of Tintin before but not as an adult much less a worn out one. It seemed like a good subject for a watercolor so …