The Unseen Bianca #1

This is a series of short articles about the mistakes, mishaps and favourite bits of Bianca and the Satanic Witches web comic - things I want to high light for one reason or other. Especially stuff that has been hidden until now.

This first article is about Bianca and the Satanic Witches episodes #1-5.


As I have stated before I make Bianca in bits and pieces and then combine those in photoshop. It's just easier that way since I can't scan or ink larger images than A4.

This causes problems however - especially since I'm not all that good in maths. The very first page of the very first issue of Bianca and the Satanic Witches already has a huge mistake in it. The middle picture that's there to introduce both Bianca and Stuart in line art form looked like this:

But when I combined the three elements that make up the page I had put a part of the title right in front of Stuart's face obscuring it completely. This was of course really dumb of me. Jeez, going back to these very early issues induces such grimaces from me anyway. The colours look really shitty and there's mistakes like this all over the place. I clearly did not yet know what I was doing. Like, at all.

This particular happenstance did kind of work out, though, since Stuart is kind of meant to be left in Bianca's shadow until Lorena asks about him in page five. You can see his face on page three but not much attention is paid on it. So I guess this could have ended up worse yet.

On the second issue I learned an important lesson about painting. I had done this, in my opinion marvelous rendition of the run down hotel our heroes lounge about in - but then I remembered this scene was supposed to happen during night time so it was way too bright. My brilliant solution: to slather the whole thing in black water colour.




Unfortunately this just messed up the whole thing: all the details I had so meticulously created. All gone. The final image looks like it was painted by a blind man drunk. This is why. So after this I never covered something with large colours after finishing the details.

I sometimes leave a big image underneath the smaller ones - kind of break the grid pattern of a page. Like these pages from issues #3 and #5.

The big pictures underneath the smaller ones have to be drawn and painted completely, though, since you often can't be quite sure how small to make the foreground images. So sometimes some of the details get lost on the compiling stage.

The very last thing I wanted to highlight is this particular image of Lorena from issue #5. It's nothing all that special but I have always liked it. It's very small in the final page and partially stays under the large image of Bianca. But now you can see it in all of it's - albeit black and white line art - glory.