Thanks for dropping by, my friend. I look forward to seeing this project of yours. I've been really busy too, so my time for DA has decreased alot over the last few weeks.
To answer your question, now that I have a good routine happening when I do these projects, I create a project in stages.
Stage 1 is set up/extraction of the subject.
Stage 2 is manipulating the subject the I want.
Stage 3 is creating a background
Stage 4 is the actual tattoo work on my subject
Stage 5 is where I finish the background
Stage 6 is image editing, clean up, resize.
Then I post it.
Basically before I start tattooing, I make sure I have the shadows and brightness/contrasts correct and I set a color for the background.