An approach to painting sides

 I've made my decisions about how to paint the sides of the cradled panels I mounted my recent encaustic monotypes on.  I

 This is one of a series of four

 

Getting ready to go 

 First I mixed a darker grayed purple and painted the sides.  When it dried it was more purple than I wanted and looked harsh with the greens.  

Added gray but it was difficult to cut the purple so I had to take another approach.

Then I mixed neutral gray with a tad of purple and got a gray with a purple undertone right).  I mixed this with lots of gloss medium and brushed it on over the original purple to get a much more grayed effect that I found pleasing.

 The colour match was good but there's something about all that purple that detracts from the image. Now I'm thinking it needs to be even grayer.  I'm letting it rest for awhile.  Of course when it is hung on the wall the edges aren't as obvious.

 One from the second series all with the same colour scheme.

 

 First I mixed a cadmium red light toned a bit for the edges and painted them all. Garish!!

 Then I mixed a match for the blue green and painted all the sides.  Better than the orange but it was still too bright. So I tried the same approach with this lot.  I used a neutral gray and added a bit of cobalt turquoise to it (left below) .

 

You can see the difference in the two colours . The grayed one is much less distracting.

 I'm wondering if I should just mix the gray with a slight undertone of the dominant colour and be done with it. Any amount of the dominant colour appears too bold when it dries.   The sides would  then all be some version of gray.   What do you think?