I’m attempting to learn vocab related to one of my hobbies, which is painting, and I’m having some trouble figuring out the connotations of some words. Denotation for nouns is often pretty obvious, but with some descriptive nouns and some adjectives it’s difficult to tell whether the type of “vivid,” “bright” etc refers to what I think it’s referring to. Some words seem to have strong connotations regarding personality or what have you, but also seem to refer to visual mediums. That’s one very specific example, but it’s not the only situation where I run into this.

How do you resolve confusion? Do you run words by someone fluent in Japanese to get their take? Are there other resources I can use to find words used in sample sentences? Denshi Jisho doesn’t have example sentences for everything, which is why I’m wondering. Their definitions can be spare.