Well, that's all a matter of choices and what singles one artist out from another. There's a sensibility to it that one develops from trial and error or seeing examples of it in the world. If you're doing a style that matches the vision of existing art, then you usually have to match that the best you can.
That's the quickest way -- look around, do searches and see what you like and then go and do it using those sensibilities. The more examples you look at, the broader your choices.
Artists have often been about trying to find that happy balance between rendering in every little detail compared with saying the same thing with less information. Putting everything in can get cluttered or it can feel right if masterfully handled where you can help the viewer's eye sort through the info. Noodling everything in also tends to take a comparatively long time unless you are automating the process. But for some people it's relaxing and joyful wandering around in their personal universe.
On the other hand, if you put in too little, you run the risk of being boring, and also not giving the viewer enough to 'listen'. You have to have something interesting in your picture whether it's clever marks, clever editing, good color, or the subject is intriguing. Also, the simpler the image, the more scrutiny what you actually do include will be under. So if it's a single mark, for example, you'll want that single mark to be perfect. If it's lost in 1000 marks, it's potentially less important how perfect each mark is because you're going to be looking at the mass of marks more to some degree.
Think of a beautiful person -- they don't have to say much and yet we're intrigued by them. It's because there already exists something -- a rapport and instant charismatic quality that is present just by their being so beautiful. It's why TV and movies can get away with inane or trivial stories when they have youth and beauty in their actors. Your selecting what to put in has a lot to do with the beauty or interest you include in all the various levels of creating your work. And then there's the million dollar question -- what is beautiful? It depends on countless variables, including who is the viewer and what do they experience as beautiful, or interesting, or frightening or disgusting or or or . . . etc.
You see there, I could have lengthened that exhaustive list saying all the things that could be used as examples, or I could stop because the reader gets the point. And therein lies the challenge for the artist too. You see what words I choose, and how many of them I include would produce a different response. Same with what you're asking. But were I a beautiful person having coffee with you, you could listen to me babble on for hours and find it compelling, because there would be something in you that would keep you interested. If you found me off-putting, you would want me to get to the point and move on. That's precisely what you're asking in how to edit. So you see it's impossible to have one answer.
If you were writing a description in words it's a similar conundrum. Over explanation can get tedious and is unnecessary and you can have your audience space out and ask what your point is. That's where you have to be skillful and somewhat intuitive finding how much is enough to make your point and produce the desired response.
With painting and design, you have to consider if a single brush stroke and a couple blobs of paint says enough through implication. And in fact your audience can be dazzled by how non-literal and how artistic you can get with your invention, not unlike those old paintings where you are up close and it's a bunch of sloppy, heavy-handed paint strokes, but you step back a few feet to view it and it tightens up into a photographic representation. And you scratch your head and marvel at the cleverness of the artist. Similar thing.
It's not a formula, unless you copy something that already exists. And that saves time. But you're probably going to have to do some experimentation -- and that may lead to you coming up with something even better with your own voice.
Good luck and have fun in your searching and developing a 'rhetorical' style. There is no one answer. 
Last edited by D Akey; 02-18-2015 at 03:06 AM.
"Not a bit is wasted and the best is yet to come. . ." -- remembered from a dream
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Originally Posted by Caesar
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