Sheena: Queen of the Jungle #1 - Cover Replica

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle #1

Here's the original cover by Dave Stevens.

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And here's my Cover Replica of the Sheena: Queen of the Jungle cover.  (The coloration is a bit washed out in the picture, but given the size of the cover replicas, they are always a bit tricky to photograph.)

Well, I **FINALLY** finished another GIANT cover re-creation for my pal, Jim, from Jimmy Jams Comics and Games here in Winona, MN.  It is yet another painting which took far too long to finish.  The weird thing is it took longer to finish the Sheena cover than the Brian Bolland "Killing Joke" cover I did, which seems to be far more involved than this one.  Sigh...

As usual, here are the Step-By-Step's for those interested... :-)

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STEP ONE:  I glued a sheet of (140#) Stonehenge paper to a 20" x 30" (that's 50.8cm x 76.2cm to those of you who use the Metric System) piece of hard board/medium density fiberboard using matte medium.  Then I used a mixture of gesso and matte medium to serve as a ground for the painting.  I ruled out a 1" grid and then used a blue pencil to draw out the picture.

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STEP TWO:  I began to fill in some of the general flat colors using acrylic paint.  Then I thought I should go ahead and use a drybrush technique right away for the shading on Sheena.  I masked off the area around her back and legs with some low-tack tape that wouldn't stick to the painting too much, to try and minimize the amount of drybrushed paint from over-running the background and build up too much.  Later, it turned out that drybrush technique didn't work out quite as well as I wanted and was very difficult to color-match for any mistakes/changes made... 

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STEP THREE:  Here are most of the background colors and tree/vine work.

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STEP FOUR:  And here it is a little further along...

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STEP FIVE:  I painted over the drybrush effects on Sheena from earlier, as it was just becoming too much of a problem trying to match everything whenever I would goof up some line or shaded region (it happens, unfortunately).  So, instead I used thin layers of acrylic paint mixed with acrylic mediums to blend the colors, instead.  It seemed to work out well enough.  I used the same effect for the color blending on the log she is standing on.

Once the underpainting was done, I went over top with the linework using black acrylic paint thinned down with water and blending medium.  I used Krylon Matte Finish as a fixative, as well as a separate UV-protecting finish, and called it **DONE**!

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This was done with acrylic paint on 20" x 30" gessoed Stonehenge paper glued to hardboard.

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