The Unseen Bianca #10

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 #46-50.




We are quickly catching up the comic series itself, aren't we? It's kind of weird to talk with so much detail about so recent episodes in our story ark.

One character who has become more and more important as of late is of course our main adversary, Lady Seaborn - even so much that we see her back story in the double issue flashback of #47-48. More of those later, though.

The identifying thing of Lady Seaborn is her fairy glow - the blue gleam on top of her and even her speech bubbles.

The character is drawn and coloured normally, as but then I apply this big blue paint job on top of her using the PhotoShop layer style "Screen". This is the fairy light blue used in episode #47 (and possibly some others since I do recycle these quite a bit) and what the character looked normally before I applied this effect:

Episode #46 starts with a page that has a big panel in the background. Unfortunately this looks pretty bad. The idea is that the creature is holding Valerie from her neck, dangling her from the roof of a building. I somehow chose a really naff camera angel for this which is why it's really difficult to even understand what is happening.

The line art in of itself is a little bit clearer, but then again, it has all those other panels on top of it which doesn't help.

The first page of issue #50 has a very similar scheme but this time works as is intended. You get all the important information from the background panel in this one, I think:

This is how that line art looked like, anyway:

As I said, issues #48-49 were the flashback to the youth of some of our characters. This meant, of course, playing with the colour schemes once again. This image is from page four of issue #48. I think it's one of my better looking background paintings, especially taking into account it's minuscule size.

This is how that same background looked like before playing with colour filters. You can see I cheated a bit with it, knowing it would be all changed up before I was done with it.

I payed extra attention on Anya's old room seen in episode #49. I wanted it to look like it would not only truly belong to her but also like a believable young adult's schoolgirl room. This is the page four from that issue:

And this is the original background painting. You might recognize some of the posters on her walls. Anya was a regular music lover, one can see!

To play us out I like to point out this very small, borderless panel on the bottom of page seven from the same number. It is so small it's hard to make out the details.

Here is the original line art for that. I think that came out rather nicely, don't you?