If you're doing a painting (e.g. as a present) and you don't know how to proceed, open an image editing programme of your choice (Gimp, Photoshop, whatever), and do a small preview pic:

(lol, watermark...)

Nothing overly detailed or refined, just a small replica of what the pic is going to look like. In my case, I was having trouble with the snowy slopes; so I tried this and that, and after a while I came up with this result

(watermark strikes again... sorry guys)

Don't worry, the final painting looks much better, this was done merely to give me an idea of how I could achieve the effect I was going for.

Maybe that's helpful for you...

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Watermarks were added mainly as a practise for me; I thought since these are only examples anyway, it wouldn't hurt... I can change that though if you can't see anything