When painting its important to paint over edges not just up to an edge.
I’m still working on the background and the one thing that I’m being careful about is not saving the perfect edge of the figure. If I tried to save the contours of the figure then I would be painting up to the edge of the figure and a halo would form around the entire contour of the figure. This halo effect comes forward and looks as if it is part of the figure and would fail to push the background behind the figure. So when I paint, I go over the edges a little bit to avoid this. I can always go back in and improve the figure later, in fact I was already planning on refining the entire figure at least once.
