Monday, January 12, 2009

She's Aces!

No real theme here except that after posting Saturday's cover, it occurred to me that just a few month's later Bolles did a very similar pose. So I pulled this 1934 issue of Spicy out of my files and just about gave up right there. As you can see from the initial photo below the magazine was in ratty, no...make that "mousy" shape and by that I mean the missing pieces of the cover may well have been chewed off by mice. They seemed to have a taste for the covers but would skip over the contents, just like subscribers to Spicy! Worse though, was the cover printing which was abysmal. The paper was really cheap, and it looks to have been a three color print with way too heavy with the magenta. So I fiddled and fiddled and came up with this fix. There still are problems but I am sure it is truer to the original. Bolles was fixated on getting skin tones just so. In letters he wrote about painting he would go on in great detail about skin tones and describe the exact palette he used and what specific colors he blended (six or more) to get the color the way he wanted it. At some point I should upload some of these as he included some interesting charts and sketches in some of them. I'll also be posting series of covers over the years that revisited the same pose or theme.


A bit of a post-script here. I've decided to fiddle some more with the cover, as her skin tone looks like she's been overusing some sort of instant tanning product. So here's yet another version.

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