The Unseen Bianca #5

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 #21-25.




In episode #21 we get to real action, gun play and all. Here is an innocent bar maid getting brutally shot by Vernon Merrier, one of our antagonists:

I build these images in few stages: I usually draw the characters themselves and with the bullet holes but no blood.

I then add the blood and the movement lines of the bullets flying through air in a different layer that I have also drawn, just turned red and left with a little less opacity than usual.

Page 6 from issue #22 is one of these "collage" type pages where the images go on top of each other.

This is how the line art looks for the big, first panel, partially obscured in the end by other panels:

This shows you how there is a lot of work in comic books that might not ever show in the final page but without what the end result would be much more boring.

In issue #24 we begin out multi part flashback saga about Stuart's past. I decided to make the flash backs look a little different from the present day stuff by limiting their colour schemes. The characters are all build from few different shades of different colour (in case of #24, yellow) where as the backgrounds I do normally but then wash with the same hue in Photoshop.

This is from the second page of #24:

And this is how the background looked originally:

On the same issue I also made a huge mistake. I put one of the narration boxes - the one on the top right corner - on a completely wrong place resulting in it going too far to the margins of the page. This is how the top row of page seven originally looked:

I didn't notice this until I was already compiling the ready made, scanned and vectored images so I had to do some vector based magic to rearrange the words after the fact and to hide the disturbances. Also notice the fucked word in the lower narration box.

On the next issue I chose the colour blue as the primary one. Colours are of huge importance to me and I play a lot with them on Bianca and the Satanic Witches.

On the fourth issue I once again have panels going on top of each other. Like this:

This is how the first panel line art originally looked like:

The same goes for the dramatic last page with a huge explosion on it. It is partly obscured by the other panels - and of course turned blue.

This is that explosion in it's original painted form.

I do like explosions. And I'm not even Michael Bay, I promise.