Painting and observing directly from life is the best way to learn to paint, but studying other paintings is essential also. Knowledge about painting and technique has been handed down through history so there’s no sense in re-inventing the wheel.
Study paintings to see how other artists simplify shapes or how heavy or thin they apply the paint is helpful in developing your own view of nature. Don’t study just one artist, but as many as you can. Look at how they treat edges, hard or soft. Look at how they see color, do they push temperature contrast or emphasize muted color harmony.
Studying the way other artists deal with composition is helpful too, or how they deal with detail. I think that’s why I enjoy looking at certain paintings, they have solved problems I struggled with. So don’t try to re-invent the wheel, with the internet an infinite number of good and bad examples are at your disposal.
t thin because you’re not sure how to mix colors. This is a problem because paint thinned with a lot of thinner or medium is weaker color. Oil paint is opaque and works best when 
Sam Harris, born in England in 1889, came to Los Angeles at the age of 15 with his father and 6 siblings. He soon started his art career doing signs and lettering on the sides of buildings. Sam attended evening classes at the Art Students League in Los Angeles and the Cannon Art School where he studied with Hanson Puthoff among others. He pursued a commercial art career where he painted posters for the Santa Fe, Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroads.
An exercise using a Triadic Color scheme is a good way to familiarize yourself with the color wheel. A triadic scheme is any three colors equally spaced on the color wheel. Trying a variety of triadic schemes for the same subject gives you a feel for each color and how it relates with colors as well as forcing you to see your subject in different
colors and temperatures. An example from the color wheel would be ”red, blue, yellow”, another would be “green, orange, violet”. The first image shown here is 
was a Russian artist born in 1860 in a poor but educated family, he taught german and french early on until he enrolled in the Moscow School of Painting and Architecture. During this time he painted scenery for the Opera and developed a long close friendship with the author Anton Chekhov. 
many urban landscapes, most were pastoral. They had a romantic quiet mood, 
Paintings with a complementary color scheme use complements as the overall predominant color in the painting. Like orange and blue, green and red, violet andyellow. This also includes the in-between colors on the color wheel, like red-orange and blue-green or blue-violet and yellow-orange. It’s not a calming or peaceful scheme like the analogous colors which pick colors next to each other on the color wheel. Complements are opposites and can be jarring or more unsettling. 
The trouble with painting from color photoraphs is the color in the photographs. It’s usually not very good even though with digial technology it’s certainly better but not as good as seeing the real thing. A good way of dealing with photographic color is to work in color schemes. Picking a scheme that best represents the mood or lighting in your reference. For instanced an “
