Final book design - background

I spent the last few days finalising my ideas for use of colour and composition and chose to illustrate the final design for my concertina book.

I'm happy with how this background came out, as it has a lot of different interesting textures due to the largely unpredictable nature of brusho and the different quantities in which I used it. 

I consciously chose to leave all the visual elements that represent the influence of the modern world, such as the houses on the street and the man made bridge etc, blank with just line work as I feel it breaks up the piece from being overloaded with too much colour, and thematically I wanted to express that the vibrancy in the book comes from the nature aspect, and the modern elements are more cold and not as expressive or free as the elements of nature. 

I stayed until 9 every night this week until I'd finished as I wanted to make sure Id been able to capture the different textures in the overall image, going from grass to dirt to mud to water to trees etc, before taking it down to print digitally. As I was drawing this out I realised that if I put the character in and tried to paint around her, I'd definitely cock it up and the ink could bleed or the colours could mix and corrupt each other. To avoid this I drew out my character seperately on thick card, in order to glue her on top of the piece before scanning.