Shoe Trouble 2

Here's the background. I like to do it sort of like animation and paint a full background so that I can go in and do each character separate and move them around to find the best layout. I even do each individual plant and picture on it's own layer so if I need to move those around later I can as well. This is all done in photoshop using brushes I created that have the canvas texture to them. I start a shape by painting a base color at 100% opacity. Then I lay down 90% shading and highlights and go back with my brush set to 40% and basically smooth everything out. It's a lot of selecting with the eyedropper tool to get the middle tones I need. It takes a little time, but it's fun. I enjoy it.Now that I look at it, I may have made this background too crisp which might distract from the front characters later. We will see...