Moody River I and II

Moody River II (on Uart) above, Moody River I (on black Canson) below.
These two paintings were done in a recent APS workshop with Liz Haywood-Sullivan, a beautiful pastel artist and talented, giving teacher. The challenge was to paint the first painting, immediately above, on black Canson paper, which was much harder than it seemed since the black made every color look very high-key and hence you had to keep lowering the color value. The second image was painted on a cream-colored Uart sanded ground with a tonal underpainting. The difficulty for me in this second painting, located above the first, was in getting my darks to read correctly, as my reference photo was a very dark, moody river scene with overhanging trees. I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop, despite my struggles with the darks and also with trying to duplicate the two scenes (not something I am good at). You can see that the second painting is much brighter than the first. Which do you prefer?

Pastel, images 23x19