Masterpiece quilt from Katie Pasquini-Masopust class - Part One

I wrote an earlier post about a class sample that I made in Katie Pasquini Masopust's class.  She encouraged us to take a picture of our own and, using her technique, turn it into our masterpiece.  I decided to use a picture that was taken of a craggy tree on a foggy hike.  Here is the picture with the overlay of the intended quilt.

And here is the drawing blown up to size (32" x 62") and colored and labeled.

I pulled three stacks of fabric colors - orange, red, and black/white.  These were sorted into 7 steps and the fun began.

I used the colored piece as my map, and used the second piece for my pattern.  The pattern was cut out one piece at a time and used as a template to cut out the material.  This quilt has raw edges throughout, since the turning of all the edges of all those pieces didn't seem like anything I wanted to do.  So, I used a combination of basting spray and fusible web to get the pieces stuck up on the design board.  These pieces were stuck right onto the batting.  Here is a progress picture:

Once I had all of the pieces cut and put up on the wall, I took a black and white photo and saw some problems.   Here is the picture, can you see the problems too?

The problems:
1.  I felt that there was too much dark on the left side, which made the piece feel unbalanced.  Even though that was the way it was in the original picture, it just took away from the effect of the tree.  The great big piece of dark gray needed to be changed to something lighter and smaller pieces of light material needed to be added on top of the dark red.
2.  It needed more dark values and branches of foliage on the right hand side.
3.  The pink circle on top looked chopped off, so some of the pieces needed to be changed to match this pink at the top.
4.  Some pieces looked chopped off where the colors changed, so a few pieces had to be added to have continuity in the shapes.
5.  Some of the orange at the bottom was too light.
6.  Some of the orange at the top was too light.

Here's the top with all the changes.  I hope you noticed these issues and can critique and fix your art quilt tops to improve them before you continue onto the quilting process.