Played by Harriet Sansom Harris, Verussa is Ulysses Bloodstone's widow and Elsa's stepmother. "When we first meet her, she's widowed. She's sad," Arden says. "She looks like old money, which was like a direction that we specifically got for her character."
As the battle for the Bloodstone unfolds, Verussa goes from polished and buttoned-up to crazed and angry. The most notable element of her transformation is the dramatic streaks below her eyes, which Arden says were created using a mixture of red pigments, including Kryolan Aquacolor in #079 ($16) with Wolfe Face Paint in Red ($13, originally $14) and Dyanessa Myricks Color Fix in Primary Red ($18) as lash paint.
"No one product is gonna give us the watercolor-type texture that we wanted," Arden says. "We wanted there to be definition in it, so like really sharp edges, but we also wanted there to be feathery texture in that, so it looked like she had been crying."
Arden also says that she customized the specific red shade so that it would look dimensional in black and white. "By choosing a primary red color, then layering that red with a deeper, slightly more violet color, it helped to create depth and dimension rather than losing tonal values once it was converted into black and white," she explains.
