In Scott McCloud's most recent exploration of the art of comics, "MAKING COMICS", there was a chapter that really struck home for me focusing on what he called World Building.

In my comic strip, Dandy and Company,I rarely have the space or the time to devote to the backgrounds. I'll use a stock few establishing shots and put in the least amount of linework possible to indicate the rest, and that's worked okay for me... at least in a comic strip. But for "The Wellkeeper", I really wanted to make a book that felt like it was set in a very real, lived in world and so I took McCloud's advice to think of Backgrounds NOT as just a backdrop like a stage play or a green screen "psudo-set" but as a real environment that my characters are really in.

It's led me to stage shots like the one above, which is considerably more time consuming than I would ever spend on a similar scene in "Dandy and Company", but I feel does a much better job of capturing the sense of the world Sebastian is in. It's a lot more work, but I'm hoping that you all will agree that it's worth it in the end.