The valley of the immortals – Photography, aviation and flight simulation

Painting of Blake and Mortimer : la vallée des immortels.

This is step 2 of the enlargement work I started from the Blake and Mortimer comic book: The Valley of the Immortals. The original album is at the bottom of the image above to give an idea of the original scale.

I want to use the entire 24 × 36 canvas space starting from a standard size comic book. I must modify the scale by adding an extra 10% to the height. However, when comes the time to draw the perfect circle located at the top left of the album, a standard 1:1 scale must be used so as not to transform the faces of the two heroes who are looking at us from the front. A painting made with two different scales does not produce a true copy, but it is still acceptable and realistic.

Trying to match an album’s original colour often requires mixing four different colours or more. Experience has shown that any newly created colour should be allowed to dry for several minutes on another canvas to ensure that it does not deviate too much from the desired colour, because it darkens when it dries. Mistakes are inevitable, however…

It looks as I will complete the canvas within the next few months, providing I work a few hours each day.

A third and final article will be published when the painting is completed.

Click on the link for more articles about graphic novels and comics on my blog.

Enlarging the Blake and Mortimer album: La vallée des immortels tome 1

In February 2023, I began transferring the cover of the Blake and Mortimer album “The Valley of the Immortals – Part 1” to a 24 x 36 inch canvas.

The photo above shows the original album sitting on top of the canvas and the work in progress. There is still a lot of work to do before the drawing and lettering are finished.

Then comes the coloring stage, to get the tones as close as possible to the original album. The cover has a lot of colors, which is not the case with many other Blake and Mortimer albums.

This particular album resonates with me for several reasons. First of all, the authors use in the scenario a Cessna C-170B type plane, which brings back memories of flying. Indeed, by a happy coincidence, in 1981 I flew across Canada in this small aircraft dating from 1952. The plane was not equipped with any air navigation instruments, except for an old compass. We were not yet in the GPS era! I published the story of this flight from St-Jean to Edmonton on my blog.

Another reason that increases my interest in the album is also related to a memory. On the cover, Mortimer is in Wan Chai District, a district I visited in 1990 during a trip to Hong Kong and the New Territories. At that time, the Cathay Pacific Boeing B-747 used the legendary Kai Tak airport and flew the approach over a huge demonstration of more than 100,000 people commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I will be posting more photos of “The valley of the immortals” painting over the next few months, numbering the title of each article so that those interested in the subject can find their way around.

Click on the link to my blog to read about the precedent painting: “Tintin and the Black Island “.