Hi.
Back in the saddle having finished a summer of classes for Blue Mountain School of Landscape Painting, Dunedin Art Retreat, and Haliburton School for the Arts. It was a great summer filled with many memorable painting moments...some success and some to ponder and adjust here and there and some for the burn pile, but, all good when it comes to miles on the brush.
There are 3 sets of tools in painting. They don't really change very much for any artist.
1) Values - you break up the space in chunks of value, degrees of light and dark that make pleasing break up of the space on the canvas. If the value scale runs from 1 being white and 10 being black, try to limit the number of values in the initial composition to values 8,5 and 2.5 saving the other values for later.
2) The second set of tools are edges. Hard edges draw attention to themselves. Softer edges are less demanding. Edges move the viewer through the composition.
3) Third is colour but not colours. Colour has temperature and personality . The warm colours are often the choices for explaining light and light movement and light relationships within a composition while the cooler colours often explain the planer shapes that are away from the source or oblique to the light source. Actual colour is often irrelevant. But colour flavour or colour temperature - thats the guts of colour as I see it.