Stripping a pattern

On my first kayak an Expedition Single, I incorperated my curved strip in with the strips.  Recently while surfing online I saw where someone striped thier deck and then cut out and removed where they wanted the pattern and filled it in.  At the time I thought it was a waste of material.

I am now ready to start the deck on my Guillemot L and have a little more intense pattern to lay and am wondering which would give me a better product.  Would it be worth the waste to have a finer piece of art?

You can view both yaks and the building process on my blog at  http://kayakkev.wordpress.com/  Any advise on keeping the split curve balanced on both sides would be a big help.

Kev