This was an experiment that ended up being very useful, so I decided to share the setup.

Principals of Operation: Instead of using an empty latent as the starting point, you can define a color gradient and encode to latent instead. This gives you much greater control and flexibility over the color palette in the image. Play with denoise to find a good value that you like based on your artstic preferences.

There is a little section at the end that layers the gradient over the image, increasing the color.

If you do re-samlping with this setup, you will likely need to slerp the latents together and resize the gradient as you go down your pipeline, or else most/all of the color data will be lost, which defeats the purpose of using this.