I tried developing the relationship between the background and figures in my scenes with another scene I was working on. I figured from my last group of experiments that the best way to separate the foreground and background (essentially what I'm doing) was to keep the figure tonally flat and not too complex while use a range of tones on the background and make it relatively complex.
To the left you can see the piece I believe works best. I think the use of various grays in the background and the pure black and white characters differentiate the two layers enough while the use of ink for both layers prevents the two aspects from being two entirely different entities. This I think is a little the case for the piece below. Though I think this to works well the figures seam a little too stuck on compared to the first piece. A similar problem comes from the colour experiment I did as well. I doesn't have the synergistic relationship the first one has in which the foreground and background support each other to strengthen the whole.