I love your color choices and your use of negative spaces. When are you publishing it?
"But if it wasn't so intense, then it wouldn't feel satisfying." All of my favorite pieces are like that- just short of having pieces of the artists themselves. Typical. Put up a video of your process sometime. I would love to see how you manage to get your watercolour like that. I'm guessing a lot of tape. I could be wrong.
For these ones, it was a good guess. I usually use masking fluid and think out what to put down first. These were too small (4" wide) so trying to paint masking fluid on would've been a pain in the ass - I cut strips of tape up into thin pieces. I don't have a video of me working but here's a blog post I put up that might visually show how masking fluid works. I took work-in-progress pics of these, so they're going into my slow post queue.