The Unseen Bianca #9

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 #41-45.


Right at the start of issue #41 I do one of my favourite tricks again: using the same background thus creating a continuous action - a "one shot" as one might say from the movie world - throughout a series of images. Here is Lorena opening a lock and entering into a library:

Here is the one background I recycled in all three panels:

Notice how the shadow of the table makes absolutely no sense in any possible perspective, lighting or dimensional state. Luckily I was able to avoid that because of the shapes of the panels.

Here is also one of these again: an image that is somewhat covered by other images.

Well, surprise surprise, I happen to like how it originally looked like so here it is in it's former glory:

In issue #42 I have nothing else to concentrate on this time but the pinup. I didn't want to make About the Pinups -thing out of this one since there isn't really anything all that special and weird about this one to merit a whole article all by itself - but it bears mentioning here.

I drew all of these character portraits individually and then put them inside the pentagram shape. Some of these I really like.

Some more than other's, though: notice how comically small Hershell's hand looks in this image. To think I didn't notice this until well after inking!

Notice also how I tried to hide the small comedy hand with a clever placing of his image within the confines of the final pinup:

In the third page of issue #44 I had only vertical panels for a change. Doing all verticals in this style of mine where the pages are comprised of small pieces is rather difficult but I do feel it's important to vary the look of the pages every now and again.

Here we unfortunately, once again, had quite a lot of speech balloons and placing them in these individual, vertical slants is indeed quite a hassle. Although here I only did page in two parts it was hard to arrange all the speech bubbles so that they wouldn't come in front of anything important - or each other!

Here is the line art for the right side of the page, with Anya's cleavage not imposed upon by word balloons.

The second page of issue #45 is once again with a big background image that fills the entire page. I deliberately wanted Lorena, who is in big trouble, to be partially obscured by the foreground panels as if she is trying to hide behind them.

That still meant I had to draw the full image and I really like how it looks. This is how the line art originally looked like:

On pages seven and eight of the same episode we see Vernon Merrier finally meeting his end by flying into the weird portal that only Bianca is able to walk through - and only on her birthday. This of course tears him to pieces quite brutally.

I wanted the other side of the gate to look as otherworldly as possible so I both drew and painted the colours as negative images. That's why even the colours seem a bit off and strange.

Finally, we have this small corner panel of Lorena. The image is partially obscured by the more normal looking panels.

You might notice they hide her other nipple - well, free the nipple as I always say! Here is the original line art: