Tones tell a story

Here's an example of using an overall tone in a painting (in this case warm) to suggest the feeling of fall. Even the angle of the light which is low on the horizon can suggest that it is a season coming to an end. The subtle touch of red colors under the tree suggests fallen leaves. This suggestion does the trick much better than actually trying to paint leaves with small strokes.
It's actually a very simply done painting with attention to detail being paid to only the areas of primary interest.

Green paintings

I've been told that paintings with lots of green in them are hard to sell. That very well may be true. To avoid making a green painting, I often leave green off my palette entirely but mix my own greens instead. This avoids having that green tube color dominate which everyone can recognize as a tube color. Mixing reds or sienna colors with greens helps. Also starting with a burnt sienna undertone in the painting will cut down that green look and warm the overall colors of the greens.

Insuring a center of interest

One way to insure that the center of interest stay as the focal point is to place the darkest darks next to the lightest lights.

Framing paintings for the web

When you see a framed painting on my website or newsletter, most likely it was not framed at all. It's difficult to photograph a framed painting because often the straight edge of a frame can be warped or curved because of the camera lens. Using a 50mm lens usually fixes that but in my case I have photographed a number of frames without paintings in them.

So I photograph frames that I like. I've even photographed frames in frame shops with the owners permission and it really doesn't matter at that point if they have paintings in them or not. I then adjustment those images of the frames in Photoshop to make them nice and rectangular and so on and from then on out, I have a ready stock of frames that I can then easily drop new paintings into.

The small and the big

It's very important to learn how to see the subtle nuances in the subject you're painting especially with colors and values and at the same time keep a major focus on the big shapes.
In this plein air painting I tried to keep my major shapes large while also trying to capture the subtle changes within those larger shapes. One of those subtleties was getting perspective lines in the sand that ran down towards the water.