Boardwalk Showers part 22

Since I had the new proof and all my watercolor stuff with me from yesterday's session at the Boatworks, I decided to just work from home today while I took care of other business. I started today's coloring by going back to the figures, making some subtle adjustments to all of them, though nothing likely to be noticed in these blog photos. Then my first stab at a background. Yesterday I pulled out an old print (see above) from storage, a part of my Ecclesiastes series, set in a similar setting to my new print. I liked the color combination in general and figured it was a good starting point. I mixed up a reddish color and put it on three of the horizontal rows of tiles. That worked fine. Then I used the same color to color the bank of lockers on the left side. Not so fine. In my opinion, too intense and heavy a color to take up such a large portion of the panel, but you can look below and make up your own mind.

After a couple of hours of staring at it, I came up with plan B. I went over the lockers twice with more watercolors- first a wash of white, then a slightly heavier application of white mixed with a buff color. When first applied it has a very neutral beige color not uncommon to lockers, but it mixed with the red as it dried. The result is lighter and more neutral, but still with a reddish tint. The new version is below.

The next thing I have to decide about is the floor. My original thinking had been a light color (as in the janitor example at the top of the post), but now that I lightened the lockers, I'm open to other possibilities. In fact, I have three colored proofs of that janitor print. All three started like the one above, but on one I moved the floor color up to the lower part of the wall and put a much darker reddish brown color on the floor. I liked the new version better, and it was the one I decided to frame for exhibitions. It can be seen in the photo below.

Would it work on such a large area as the whole floor? Going to give that some thought before I do any more coloring.