I'm rereading Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, as I've decided that I really miss painting landscapes, especially in plein air, but the reason I stopped doing it was because I wasn't happy with my results and I wasn't making progress (ugh, watercolors!). Carlson's book is DENSE. I gave up highlighting it because almost every paragraph would need a highlight, but I am typing up notes as I read, with the hopes of eventually creating a cheat sheet for myself. One of the first lessons he writes about is his "theory of angles," where, for an average landscape, the sky, ground, trees, and mountains have certain relative values. Thinking about the six studies I just completed , I realized that I had arbitrarily assigned the sky a mid value, to make the house more the focal point, but according to Carlson, the sky should be the lightest value of the natural objects. Oops. So I redid the value study, using his theory. I kind of like it. Looks more "