Body painting evokes three things we at Playboy hold in the highest regard: sensuality, expression and freedom. In the late 1960s our editors called it a “provocative art,” and the intervening half century has done nothing to dim its power—whether the paint is worn by the Dixie Chicks or the desnudas. Join us for a photographic mini-tour that includes some never-before-published treasures from our Archive, as well as a couple of greatest hits from the magazine’s pages.

Model Sharon Kristie graced multiple PLAYBOY covers over the years, but it’s the March 1968 issue that colors our memory most vividly. David Chan shot the previously unpublished cover outtake above, but we’d like to recognize staff photographer Mario Casilli for the exquisitely detailed, paint-by-number-inspired Rabbit Head he created on Kristie’s latissimus dorsi. Casilli also shot Brush-On Fashions, the pictorial from which the outtake originates.

From that same pictorial comes this iconic photograph (appropriately titled “Artist”) of a paintbrush-wielding Eve Ehlers. It’s one of Casilli’s most-recognized works, and a framed print of it hung in Playboy’s Beverly Hills headquarters. Casilli brought a superior sense of movement and energy to his work; as he astutely remarked in Brush-On Fashions, “Viewer impact is one of the prime characteristics of imaginative body painting.” And Ehlers makes quite an impact. (She also posed as the Cancer sign for the April 1968 pictorial Playboy Horoscope, a detail the Playboy office Cancers felt compelled to share.)

Art imitates life with astounding verisimilitude in the tromp l’oeil above. Its subject, Prussian countess Vera Gottlieb von Lehndorff—or Veruschka, as she is also known—had already conquered the world of high-fashion modeling when she appeared in our pages. “The camera is my friend,” she told us in January 1971 in the first of her two PLAYBOY pictorials. Whether she’s on the cover of Vogue, in a memorable scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up or in our magazine, we think Veruschka and the camera are decidedly more than friends. Yet as you can see in Franco Rubartelli’s stone-faced PLAYBOY photograph, much of Veruschka’s work in body paint was less about human beauty than capturing and expressing a deep connection to nature.

We’re sure the St. Louis Playboy Club was the hopping type of hot spot Foxy Brown rhymes about, and the batch of blacklight photos we discovered from 1969 confirms it. Shot by Herb Weitman, the above image is an unpublished outtake from Playboy’s Psychedelic Discos in the Spring 1969 VIP, our erstwhile club publication. Tapping the late-1960s zeitgeist, the St. Louis club underwent a “magic transformation…from daytime walnut and leather decor to way-out disco” every night, with the help of mirrors, projectors and—on Friday evenings—body paint. (We admit we love blacklight art, from the work of African American artist Faith Ringgold to Sabotage-era Black Sabbath posters.)

If the PLAYBOY canon were a sitcom, there would be multiple episodes titled “The One Where the Cover Model Draws a Rabbit Head on Her Belly.” It worked so well the first time, with Cynthia Maddox for the July 1964 issue, that we made a tradition of it across the decades. Recently our Archive team discovered this behind-the-scenes photo of Maddox patiently holding still as the makeup artist does his job. Others to appear with the bunny-on-belly look in our pages over the years include Miki Hamano, Heidi Montag and Shay Knuth, to name just a few.