The Garden of Ada is a concept drawing for a backyard garden that belongs to Ada Lima from Heroine Rises.

In order to continue in my attempt to make my backgrounds better and more consistent, I took the step of creating the entire setting - and then drawing the story around it.

Before, I used to have a loose idea of what a setting would look like in my mind but never a solid reference I could look at. The setting would be built up panel by panel and that sometimes led to ... an unclear sense of where the characters are. If I don't know my setting, imagine the readers!

I decided to draw up a concept for this backyard, which will be featured in the upcoming chapter of Heroine Rises next week.

For this drawing, I decided to add a new step into my workflow. I used Blender - a 3d modeling software to build up a basic sense of the house and garden before going in and drawing on top of it. My Blender skills are not good by any means, but the addition of it gives me more time to focus on the creative aspects of my piece as opposed to structural aspects like perspective, lighting, and form.

I may do this for a few more settings in the future, but for now here is the process I took while making this. I used a monochromatic color scheme because I'm not very good at coloring lineart!