Painting progress

Okay, so I had a couple chunks of time this weekend to work on my large painting inspired by classical Chinese art.  The bamboo is done and I'm pretty happy with the shading.  The characters all came out nicely but I'm worried they're a bit small to fill that space.  Originally I planned to fill in the whitespace around them with black background to provide a nice sharp contrast.  Now I'm re-thinking it and may 1) just keep the white squares but tidy them up a bit, or 2) tidy up the edges and also paint over the three black spacers between the characters to create one big white rectangle, or 3) add an outer border of purple, which will include making the three spacers purple as well.