"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.