The final image—you can see where I have introduced texture into the water and the sky, which adds a much more painterly effect to what is, in essence, a vectorized image.

A close up of the stormy sea, the jagged rocks and spiky sea monsters provide a threatening counterpoint to the "protective bubble" that the little girl inhabits.

A close up of the little girl within the bubble. The danger at this stage of the process was adding too many spotlight effects to the bubbles and creating unnecessary distractions from her serene expression.
 

 

Here you can see that I am working on creating a stormy and threatening sea. The undulations of the waves and the way that they foam and surge needs careful consideration. The cat isn't looking too worried.

Here you can see the Affinity Designer interface. Affinity is perfect for my requirements—nowadays I do most of my work in Affinity Designer. It is incredibly responsive and shows the effects of running filters such as Gaussian Blur in real time.
The girl was drawn from memory and Affinity's interactive capabilities and RAM efficient handling of blurs and blends alllowed me to achieve the look I required with the minimum of fuss.

Here is the girl being drawn out in using Affinity Designer's vector tools. It has both a vector and a raster interface thereby avoiding the inconvenience of commuting between two programs. You can still see the Manga Studio "under-drawing" appearing behind the girl.

 

Here is the start of the tracing process using Affinity Designer's pen tool.

Still working within Manga Studio 5 EX, I am coloring up the artwork.

Here is the initial drawing for 'Living in a Bubble'. You can see that, initially, the idea I had was of a girl in a bubble floating over an idyllic English landscape. I changed it to a night scene with a stormy sky and threatening sea to add a sense of tension to the piece.