Kevin MacPherson, in his book Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light & Color suggests beginner painters get into the groove of thinking first of big shapes (whether for landscapes, still life or figure studies) and then mapping out those big shapes first before getting into the smaller shapes & detail.

I found out about Kevin MacPherson when I signed up as a Patreon for PaintCoach (aka Chris Fornataro); Chris teaches the same thing in his tutorials on Patreon and videos on YouTube.

MacPherson even suggests doing 100 of these “starts” (the big shapes) as I did below, based on one of the PaintCoach tutorials.