What does design have to do with painting?

As crazy as the version on the left seems, it's not far off from something I see fairly often: thoughtlessly placed colors and values, ruining a perfectly fine drawing

Many of the students who take my painting class at BYU have limited training in painting.  Because of this, I expect to find a lot of structure or technique-related problems.  Surprisingly, while those other problems sometimes show up, the flaws that hurt students' paintings the most are usually design problems!

Some things I see all the time:
- A badly-designed drawing ruining what would otherwise be a fine painting
- Poorly-designed values resulting in visual chaos
- Unappealing renders of character designs that look great as drawings
- Ugly color schemes
- Workable color schemes ruined by poor distribution of colors
- Weak or confusing value/color composition
- Arbitrary or default decision-making, resulting in a generic image

While good structure and technique are essential up to a point, design seems to affect most whether or not a painting is successful and appealing.  The problem with design is that while the tenets are simple, the principles are so interconnected and expressive that there are endless ways to convey any single idea using completely different design principles. 

Because of this, implementing good design into painting isn't a simple thing to learn.  I've studied design a lot, yet I still struggle with some pretty basic things all the time.  I confess this is part of the reason why I want to do this series of posts.  If I can work through some of these complex ideas some more, maybe I'll get better.  If not, at least some of you will get a peek into how I think about art as I work.

Now that I've introduced the subject, we're going to dig into specifics.  We'll systematically break down each of the above subjects, in addition to some other things that are affected by design in painting: texture, silhouette, dimensionality, and communication of ideas or emotion.