Here is a weird little side project I got done this week. It’s called “Painted Veronica #34.” It’s starts with a Friday night YouTube show that I do with a couple of friends, Paulo and Wilson, in which we talk about comics live on YouTube for three hours. As part of the show we play a game involving three comic books called “Read, Rip, and Slab” with is a comic book version of the classic game “Kiss, Marry, Kill.” As this game has evolved over time we’ve added couple of things to it such as hypothetically adding pink flamingos onto one of the comic book covers to watch the action going on.
These flamingos lead us to one of our views pointing out an Archie comic that already had pink flamingos on the cover. That comic is Veronica #34 from some time in the early 1990s. As a consequence I looked up that comic on eBay to see how much a copy sells for. It turns out that Archie comics that have Betty or Veronica on the cover in bikinis go for a premium. This is one such cover so the asking price for a copy is between twenty five and forty dollars.
I’m mostly a buyer and reader of new comic books. I go to my local comic shop every week and buy whatever new comics that are out that interest me. But occasionally a back issue will catch my interest and that’s when I turn to eBay. Often the back issue is fairly obscure so that the internet it the best place to find it. When that happens I don’t buy the issue right away but take some time to find a good copy at a good price.
That’s how I ended up watching the price on Veronica #34 and seeing that it was never going to be cheap. I didn’t want to spend $25 on a comic that I only wanted for a whim. It’s not like a lot of them were selling either. It looked like the same copies just sitting there in eBay stores.
After a couple of months of not buying the comic I decided to make my own version of the cover. I’ve drawn a few cover recreations over the years just for fun and I thought I would do this one. That’s when I decided to take it a step further.
In my series of “Covers to Comics That Don’t Exist” I have this one series called “Painted Women.” In that series I draw a female figure and then draw tattoos all over her. The tattoos are mostly geometric shapes and lines. I treat the body as a canvas for an abstract painting. I decided I wanted to mix the Veronica #34 cover with the painted lady concept.
I had a similar idea a few years ago with the cover to DC Comics’ “Showcase #79” featuring the character Dolphin but I don’t think I quite pulled it off. I don’t think the tattoo designs were strong enough. I was going to make sure to work on that with Painted Veronica.
The first thing I did was to redraw the original cover. I grabbed a photo of the cover that I found on the internet, blew it up, and printed it out in blue line on an 11×17 inch piece of paper. That way I can draw right on top of the original drawing.
Often I draw with a .7mm 2B or 4B mechanical pencil. For whatever reason whenever I’m making a cover recreations I use a .5mm 2B mechanical pencil. The thinner line helps me see what the original artist was doing. So that’s what I did. I redrew the entire cover with that pencil. Then I set to work on the tattoos.
For the tattoos I went with the shapes that the body suggested. Short shapes and long shapes depended on the length of the body part. The shapes that went around the forearm were short and the ones that went the length of the thigh were longer. I was just trying to make it look interesting. I even put some eyeball designs on the bikini.
After the pencilling was done I scanned the drawing in. At this point I also had to recreate the “Veronica” logo. I did that in Adobe Illustrator and then added the “Painted” logo from my “Painted Ladies” series. I added those logos plus my Radiant Comics logo in place of the Archie one to the pencil drawing and printed it out on an 11x17inch piece of paper to be inked.
The inking was straight forward. I kept the inks fairly thin lined like the original. At first I used a pen to put down a lot of the ink lines in the background and then I switched over to a brush for the main figure and the flamingos.
At first I was thinking about coloring the piece with markers but the original colors were simple and it would be easy to reproduce them digitally. So that’s what I did. After scanning in the inks I set it up for color in Photoshop and it only took me a couple of hours to color it. At some time I might go back and marker color it too and make the color more interesting but for now it’s okay.
After all the color was done I made a print of the cover. I’ve got some nice thick matte paper for my printer that’s 11×17 inches so I could make a full size print of the art. It always takes a couple of test prints to get the color just right and fix any mistakes. It’s amazing to me how there are always a couple of things in any given print that I don’t see on screen but once the piece is on paper they jump out at me. It’s usually not big stuff but little details here and there that might not be right. This is when I fix that stuff.
In the end I like how “Painted Veronica” came out. It’s a bit of fun.