Thank you all for your ideas about how to proceed. Otto and Pam liked rotation ‘A’, Kerfe and/or Nina (memadtwo) liked rotation ‘D’ and perhaps a more intense purple. Estela and others liked the colors as they were.

Today’s experiment:

Instead of proceeding with the original watercolor in real life, I loaded my Crowd Source composition into Photoshop and worked with the latex mask (the original light blue lines surrounding the individual color fields). I worked with rotation ‘A’.

The following image is the same as yesterday’s, but with the latex mask replaced by the white of the paper:

Crowd Sourced – Latex Removed

Otto suggested using complementary colors within the composition. The first example shows how green, the complement of red, would look, replacing the white of the frisket. There are only two reddish fields: one on the upper right of the composition and the other at the bottom, right of center.

Crowd Sourced with Green (complement of Red)

Next, I replaced the white traces left by the frisket with purple, the complement of yellow.

Crowd Sourced with Purple (Complement of Yellow)

Yellow is the dominant color in this study, so it should provide maximal contrast.

I tried two other replacements for the white pattern: red and tan.

Crowd Sourced with Red (not used as complementary color)

Crowd Sourced with Added Color Chosen From Gradient Field

Neither of these colors is a complement to any of the colors in the rest of the composition. In fact, the intense red is not found anywhere in the study. On the other hand, I sampled the tan color from a point near the center of the red-to-yellow gradient field (just under the upper reddish field).

The bold red is a stark divider between the fields, while the tan color merges the fields together.

Other possibilities:

The Photoshop thumbnails above give one an idea of how the composition would look if painted with any of the given colors. I did these very quickly and used only one color in each example. With watercolors or inks, I would have more flexibility. I could use more than one color in each trace: a purple color adjacent to the yellow field, merging to green adjacent to the triangular red field on the upper right, for example.

The white pattern could even be considered a design element on its own and treated independently from the color field background.

More feedback!

As always, I am interested in what you all have to say. I have been thinking of washing the entire composition with a transparent earth tone, perhaps leaving obvious drips. That would certainly change the nature of the study. I’d really like to figure out how to do this on Photoshop first, however. It is much easier to remove a layer in Photoshop than in real life.

Thank you all, once again!