Quick demos - not even pretending to be finished paintings. What I was trying to show here was how we can unify shapes in a painting by carrying colors around the composition. The primary colors on the left show how I put all three primaries in each shape to "pull" the shapes together. The example on the right, done pretty much in secondary colors, shows the same principle - there is pink in the oranges, and orange in the pink flowers. This keeps our eye traveling around the painting instead of zeroing in on one color and then another. Maybe we could call this "unity and flow".
I think a flat color is a flat shape. I am conscious of this in every painting I do. I'm not always conscious of anything else, but what the heck.