Abstract Illustration - George Gershwin

My music teacher was obsessed with Rhapsody in Blue and I was born on George Gershwin's birthday so he was a natural choice. His music makes me think of New York, tall buildings, traffic jams and men in 1930's gangster suits. My preferred illustration for this piece would be much more figurative, both because the music is so visual, and because I find abstract illustration incredibly difficult.
The colour scheme had to be red, amber & green, for the traffic lights. My mark making was very disappointing....

There are lots of pages of scribbles like this. It's not scanned in well but basically I've used crayon to make  lines & squiggles.

So I tried watercolour to be a bit less inhibited,

a bit splodgy and tending to go muddy at the edges

More controlled but not exciting

I created this with a wide brush, put a blob of each colour on it and swept it across wet paper

The last image is possibly going somewhere, I could crop it to a square but there's still a lack of interest and focus in the image. I've run out of decent watercolour paper (this project has not been environmentaly friendly) so I carried on experimenting with the wide brush on dry paper,

The music is swirly and jerky but it flows too

Maybe I could use a repeated pattern, I like tessilation and order, but the music isn't like that

This is closer to how I feel about the music and I had a happy accident at the end which gives it a bit of a tail which unfortunately doesn't show very well on this scan. It would have been nice to have a longer tail but although I tried I couldn't repeat it.

It works a bit better with colour added on the computer (and you can see the tail better here)

This feels better but the colours are wrong - it looks cheap

I think this looks more sophisticated and creates a more appropriate impression. The colours may still not be perfect but I'm a bit stuck with it now.