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Oils are considered the best medium for learning how to paint because there are forgiving (you can scrap them off) and you can work with them for a period of time before they dry. Acrylic and watercolor need a basic understanding of color and values first, because every stroke is permanent. The same with pastels, all the mixing and layering is on the paper.

In art school I focused on oils, but I had to do some work in acrylic, watercolor and pastels. The idea being that you reinforce, and have better understanding, of what you know by trying different mediums. When I move from oils to pastels or watercolor it helps me see that the same aspects are important in both. It keeps me from getting too caught up in technique and think more about what's important; design, values, patterns and color temperature.

When painting a street scene, or even a rural area with buildings and structures, there are elements involved that make things a little more complicated. First is linear perspective, finding the horizon line and the vanishing points to give the buildings and roads depth. There are a lot of small simple books online that explain artistic perspective, easy to read and understand. Just a simple understanding is all you need. John Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting has a good chapter on linear perspective. But the most important part is simplifying the scene. Finding that overall shadow pattern that sets up the larger shapes and makes it easier to paint. It’s easier to see the whole composition and set up the drawing with an overall shadow pattern.

Always working with large shapes first, getting the right value and color relationships, then working smaller deciding what details to use and what to leave out.

It’s a good idea to do a smaller value study first, using ivory black and white or raw umber and white. This way you can concentrate on the values without thinking about color. Remember values are always more important than color. Then do a color version, using the value painting to check the values of your color.

Just taking a moment to talk about Color Schemes.  I know they can be a bit confusing, so here’s a little help.

About 1900, a group of Realist artists set themselves apart from and challenged the American Impressionists and academics. The most extensively trained member of this group was Robert Henri (1865–1929), who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1886 to 1888 under Thomas Anshutz (1851–1912). Anshutz had himself studied at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1876 to 1882 with Thomas Eakins, who had defied Victorian decorum in his teaching principles and in his boldly realistic paintings. After spending the years from 1888 to 1891 working at the Académie Julian in Paris, Henri taught at the School of Design for Women in Philadelphia and gave private art classes in and around that city and, during return visits to France, in and around Paris. Beginning in 1892, Henri also became the mentor to four Philadelphia illustrators—William Glackens (1870–1938), George Luks (1866–1933), Everett Shinn (1876–1953), and John Sloan (1871–1951)—who worked together at several local newspapers and gathered to study, share studios, and travel. Between late 1896 and 1904, they all moved to New York, where Henri himself settled in 1900.

One of the most prominent of American Tonalist painters, Dwight Tryon was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1849.  Though largely self-taught, he achieved enough early success painting in a Hudson River style to afford a trip to Europe in 1876. In France, he studied with Henri-Joseph Harpignies and J. B. Antoine Guillemet, but a decisive event in the evolution of his style was a summer spent studying with Barbizon artist Charles-Francois Daubigny. Upon his return to the United States in 1881, he took up residence in New York City. His search for more picturesque settings, however, led him to the fishing village of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where he summered and eventually built a small house. Among the artists he met in New York were Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Robert Swain Gifford, with whom he remained close friends.

Like many of his Tonalist peers, Tryon preferred intimate and lyrical low-light landscapes of rather simple composition. In a statement quoted in a biography published shortly after his death, he summarizes the method which gives his work an uncanny dynamism: “Often in painting a bit of sky, I will put blue on it and scrape it off; I will put pink on it and scrape it off; I will put yellow on it and scrape it off; I will put green on it and scrape it off, and my sky will look almost white-but it isn’t, for it will have in it the vibrations of all those colors.