Originally Posted by
eighty+
Please upload the photo or link to it if you would so I could comment. Not sure what it looked like, and adding straight black like you have on the right is probably not the answer. If I recall those photos that I have seen from the Grand Canyon, they generally have dark colors but they're saturated with lovely warms. It's a level of precision in the color mixing that I strongly recommend to be your next step. (When I say color mixing, you could pick your colors straight from your source photo as a general starting point.)
I myself certainly am all about color and lighting and how color behaves in various lighting situations. And then too, after one gets a handle on that, one can go crazy with it. But I think that in the case of this particular place, the subtlety of the natural color is where the beauty lies. And I get that is what you are aiming at.
The other thing, if you get the color right, the detail is secondary. You can have a cracking good painting with only that working in this case.
Details can be added later based on what the specific color is in that spot so they sit properly. So get the whole big picture working first. That's often the way I would do it when trying to make it look real.
Also if you're not into too much detail, the Impressionists are a good choice to try to emulate as you are doing with your choice of Mary Cassatt. And you can go toward Monet for less detail and a more slap dash look which is also very cool in its own right.
But I think the landscape is a good one to do (along with the others for other things) at this point in your development cause it will teach you a lot about color and values.
"Not a bit is wasted and the best is yet to come. . ." -- remembered from a dream