The Unseen Bianca #2

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 second article is about Bianca and the Satanic Witches episodes #6-10.


About issues #6 and #7 I don't have horribly much to say - just some images that get somewhat obscured by other images. This is, of course done on purpose and I like to keep my pages looking alive and sometimes "messy" so the pictures go on top of each other. They are mostly still all drawn, coloured and painted in full so it's nice to see them in their full glory.

This is from Biancan and the Satanic Witches #6, page 6:

And this is from the next episode, issue #7:

Now, as I have said before, making Bianca to me has been a process. Half the time I have had no idea what I was doing. This goes for the painted backgrounds as well. I started doing backgrounds like that because it created this easy, nice texture and it also kept me from having to bother about too much detail on them. Sometimes too much simplicity is too much, though.

On issue #8, on the first page, you are supposed to arrive to the hotel with Stuart and see a huge, gaping hole on it's roof and wall. When designing the page I went rather overboard, though and changed the images from horizontal to vertical. Because I also wanted to convey the feeling of speed and hurry I also added a lot of components from other images to overlap with that middle image.

This created a very narrow image mostly obscured by the rain, elements from other images and the title plaque. So there was very little space to actually paint the damaged hotel - way too much. I also might have gone too far with darkening the image creating an ugly, dark mess - one you can't even see what it's supposed to be about!

This is how the painted background looked like before. It's not very clear either and I must have been very sloppy with the paint brush but atleast you can somewhat see the outlines of the building.

I have tried to be more careful about my page layouts from this point onward.

There was also this nice fight scene picture in the same issue that I really like but which looks really tiny in the finished page.

This is the original line drawing of it.

If you wonder about the weird, claw mark like breaks in the image, this is because I originally used to do speed lines with the painted backgrounds so I left space for them in the actual figure drawing. And man did that look like shit. It took me ages to give this up, too, and go for the more clear, better looking ink speed lines.

Lastly just a nice image of Anya peeing. From Bianca and the Satanic Issue #9 - one of my favourites in all of it's simplicity.

The final page looks good with Lorena's feet dangling in front of the larger bottom image. Here it is again as it was originally drawn: