I have no opinion, but here's a weird thing.

When I saw the first version, I was listening to an audio book of Agatha Christie's novel, "The Pale Horse."

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There are no coincidences.

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I like this one better. At least partly because it accents the concept of "pale."

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Thanks! That's two votes for black and white (one offline) and one for color.

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It's very clean. I prefer the earlier one which looks more like paint on a real wall with the brackets and bolts still in there (great job with the touchup btw, I wouldn't have noticed without comparing). The three colors also give it more life to my eye. (which is looking at a monitor calibrated for text, not images, so take it with a grain.)

I'm curious why you're using mosaic for this. It would be easy to miss that it is mosaic when you've got a relatively flat subject and the edges all match up so cleanly for the most part. The thing I love about Hockney's photo mosaics is how the individual pictures kind of capture the feel of your eye's flitting about a large scene. You'd never mistake a Hockney for a single photo because the non-matching is so accentuated. Here are a couple of good examples from the WebMuseum.

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I'm experimenting a lot with mosaic images these days. It's almost to the point where I have to force myself to take a regular picture.

I'm trying, more and more, to disrupt the plane. I think graffiti actually makes a good subject for this because it has a vibrancy of its own. A well executed mosaic could bring it alive (not to imply that I think I'm there yet. ;>)

I agree with you that Hockney's mosaics capture eye movement (in fact, I hadn't heard it so succinctly put before). I think one of the reasons his are more obviously mosaic is he was working with physical objects.

For the next one, I might shift the midtones of each layer a little bit before I add them to the mosaic, just to accentuate the differences. Or practice adding a very small drop shadow to each layer.

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I prefer the original. The color gives it a vibrancy that the black and white seems to lack. Also, the lines radiating away from the text give your eye somewhere else to go and provide some context for the central theme. The tiling isn't very evident in either one, though, so if that's what you want the viewer to notice, I'm afraid I didn't (at least, not until I read the comments and went back to look again).

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