The Unseen Bianca #11

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 #51-55.




The last five issues of Bianca and the Satanic Witches are effectively the climax of the story, so it is only appropriate to talk about them a wee bit. As the readers have no doubt noticed, the style of the comic has temporarily changed quite a bit; thanks to our antagonist Lady Seaborn getting her hands onto The Grimoire and using it's magick to change the world into her liking.

I indeed did these episodes somewhat differently, using ink wash instead of water colours and then assigning the appropriate hues on photoshop.

This is an old technique of mine that I found really pleasurable and also nice looking. I also deliberately chose to give the hues in a less precise and more expressive way to play into the otherworldly nature of Lady Seaborn's new kingdom.

I thoroughly enjoyed this ink wash stuff that I had used in some things before Bianca and it might even make itself known in some future projects I am currently pondering.

Sometimes, when the backgrounds didn't really matter, I also used re-hued textures derived from photographs I had taken myself. I blurred them so that we can see some shapes but not much more as the point of the backgrounds in these instances is to be out of focus and not in the way of the main characters. Here are some examples:

Also, here is one more of my favourite Bianca-images. It's from the first page of issue #55.

In episode #55 we return to the "normal" world and I did this in one single page spread image that kind of fades from one world to the next within the same picture.

I accomplished this by both painting the background and character colours and also ink washing them and then putting them on top of each other and fading them. That early morning shot of Shipwreck-Upon-Tweed from up high is one of my all time favourites.

The characters are basically the same, but I did ink their shadows separately since the light comes from different sides. I did this simply by photo copying the otherwise finished line art work.

Lastly, we have this very dramatic picture:

Perhaps because of my own emotional involvement within such a horrific thing, I messed up the background by drawing it from the wrong side:

This necessitated me to flip it on photoshop and also utilizing my image retouching skills in it quite a bit.

So, this is probably the last Unseen Bianca I am going to do, since there is only one episode after this. Is this really how Bianca and the Satanic Witches is going to end? Where will this all lead? What's the point of it all? Tune in next Monday to find out.