ive been doing alot of studies lately and i think my technical skills are finally at a point where i dont have to fear white canvas anymore. ive been doing alot of practice without lines just raw painting as forms and i think its greatly helped my understanding of light and its relation to forms.

my new problem is that when doing my own paintings im having trouble "doing" without "thinking" when it comes to the subject of how all the colors of an object change depending on the light of everything around it.

say for example you have a blue ball and place it into a red box and light the box from the top with a yellowish.white light bulb.
the bounce light of the red walls would appear to make the ball more purpleish instead of its true blue color. the reflective light from the bottom would light the balls bottom with a little more bright red because the saturation and brightness mixed with the proximity of the light to the ball would sort of bypass the new mixed purpleish color the ball has taken on. the top would be red tented lighter vauled and warmer colored version of the purple.

but how would you approach this on a larger scale than a controlled study? for example in this picture

say i wanted to paint a figure into the foreground near the rocks facing the ocean who was wearing a very pure red cloak, with the sky being so much further away than a ball in a box does the sky still effect the overall hue of the red that far to the ground? i assume his cloak in that scene appear more burgundy/maroon in color, but how do you calculate by how much? or is the sky even that heavy of a factor at all or would the majority of the lighting would come from the warmer orange of the sun and the bounce light from the water/ground/purple rocks behind the figure? im sure the sky would play a part to some degree but with all these factors when trying make a composition for a entire scene including props and figures ive overthought my brain to a point where i feel like i have no idea how to approach this anymore.

any discussion,advise,reading,demos, or video tutorials would be highly welcomed.

thanks for reading my long ramble =\