Last week, I posted these inked sketches to Instagram:

I already had in mind that I wanted to cut out the girl in a dress and glue her on a different background instead of just drawing the background behind her, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do yet. Mainly I was just thinking of gluing it to a plain piece of colored paper. Anyway, the next day I colored her in while I thought of what kind of background to make.

I wanted it to be kind of soft in contrast, so I thought perhaps a conté crayon drawing. But that got smudged very quickly while I was working and I couldn’t get as much contrast as I wanted. So I changed my mind and did watercolor instead.

I left her spot blank, because the marker paper is somewhat translucent. So I traced around her with the lightbox and my blue sketcher pencil. I did a rough layout sketch of what I wanted the background to look like, then laid the girl over it so I knew what to draw where.

Once everything I was dry, I busted out the trusty dollar store glue stick to put it all together. I like the contrast between the hard lines and shading of the foreground and the softer, less focused background. It works really nicely together, I think.