Jumping to a commission

Jumping from one project to another is always a challenge especially when the one you're working on is unfinished. I've been putting in a lot of hours to complete the illustration I was working on when I was hired for a commission. The new artwork is for a hotel project and the brief is very specific. Its crazy shifting between complete freedom and tight parameters. The only thing the two artworks have in common is that they're both complex in nature. 

The brief provided me with the size and orientation (30x60in) and indicated that the artwork has to be an interpretation of something I previously created titled 'Oddball' but in shades of blue. There were multiple challenges I faced trying to replicate the painting but with a different mood, orientation and palette. 'Oddball' was created on a square canvas so the first difficulty I faced was to restructure the composition. This new canvas is narrower and far taller so automatically my gut told me to go vertical instead of horizontal. Then came the darkness of the blues and the fact that I was unsure if I could add more color. This was followed by the actually dots I had to create (what color I would use, how transparent would they be, how large they would be and most importantly, where they would go). Here are both paintings side by side.