Keolis buses with the effigy of Tintin and his friends

In 2017, the Hergé Museum and Keolis Belgium created together twenty buses with the effigy of Hergé's characters. Four years later, these buses are still on the road. You can't miss them : in their back window, a portrait of Hergé by Robert Kayaert.

This association of images is part of a partnership between Keolis Belgium and the Musée Hergé. Mobility, children and accessibility to the Hergé Museum are at the heart of this initiative. The Tintin characters immediately came to mind to mark this partnership. These characters are anchored in the collective memory and are conveyed by twenty buses of Keolis.

Process

The search for visuals in the 24 albums of the Adventures of Tintin thus began. We had to find the right visual, the most striking, the most obvious, for each character, and for each side of each bus... It had to be alive, dynamic.

Once the visuals were chosen, each character was cut out, i.e. isolated from the surrounding scenery. This is a very precise job because we have to be careful to respect Hergé's line, especially as it is greatly enlarged on the buses. We can't distort the line, the famous Ligne Claire.

Once this work is done, we move on to the digital colouring, which must of course respect the original colours and be adapted to an intensive enlargement. The next step is to determine the best location on the bus, depending on the shape of the character and its movement, in relation to the Keolis image, which cannot be hidden or distorted.

That's it!