Does anyone have advice on how to set up a backbuffer as an interim drawing surface before blitting to the main screen?

I've been playing around with BitBlt but can't seem to get it to do what I want because I don't want the backbuffer visible. I can't find a way to BitBlt from a hidden form or picture for example.

Is there a way to assign the hdc of the source bitmap to some structure or something and copy the .image there?