So I know that I should avoid fighting predators when possible, both because it's a waste of color and realm damage, but when I DO need to fight, I was wondering, how can I do so with as little use of color as possible? Obviously I want to load up on crimson and silver, right?

But what else? in particular, I was wondering whether it makes any difference, in terms of color use, how I fight. I haven't played very much and so far I've just been splatting the enemies directly with color, and usually in multiple small blasts until they go down.

So... for one thing, if I'm killing this way, does it make any difference, it terms of the ratio of Color Used to Damage whether I hit a predator with two 10 point blasts or one 20 point blast?

Also, I haven't been using glyphs much for fighting predators. Mostly just because I've only just very recently picked up a few offensive glyphs, but also because I've been concerned about using them properly. But can I do more damage with the same color expenditure by using glyphs to attack rather than just throwing the color directly at the predator?

I never noticed any difference in color efficiency between the different glyphs but I found that one hit of 12 seemed more effective than two hits of 6. But I can't say for sure.

Anyone else have any advice on this topic to offer?

I found that using a glyph is more colour efficient if you manage to score a hit.
I used wasp on one of the three flying monsters in the nameless garden and only needed ~8 drops (tanked up on crimson) to kill it where I normally need about 14~16 to kill it with just raw colour.

however I also found that (at least wasp) is rather flaky in scoring a hit.
If you manage it right and the monsters are close together you can knock all 3 out of the air with roughly 10~15 drops in that level due to the explosion (can't give precise numbers here since a you can imagine the chances that all 3 are close enough together are remarkably slim and I only managed it once in waaaay to many attempts)
But there is a good chance that the thing just flies on and hits a wall doing sod all damage where raw colour always hits from what I can tell.