Melissa of The Wool and The Floss and Megan of The Needlepoint Clubhouse talk backgrounds on their Pointing It Out podcast on YouTube.
Everything you stitch has a background. You need to take into consideration how you will finish it first, to help you figure out how much background you need, what shape it will have, etc. Sometimes you won't do an open stitch (a belt, a purse) because it wouldn't wear well. Sometimes you will want to use an open stitch to show the subtle background shading or to make the background recede. Sometimes you will want to use an open stitch because it's going to be faster to stitch than a full coverage background. Occasionally you want to use a different color thread than the background to get fun effects. Sometimes you want to change the background color so you'll need to have a full coverage stitch to hide the original paint job.
If you have a background broken into a lot of different discrete areas, it's easier to do the background (or at least a few rows) first than to try and count across stitched areas. (I personally almost always do my background first, but that's just me.)
Megan and Melissa also recommend stitches, good books for background stitches, the scale of your background, etc.
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and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com
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