Still Working and Painting Backwards

Still not quite 100% on this painting, but definitely closer than I was before.  It's been a busy couple weeks so progress has been slow.

In other news, I finally understand why people flip their paintings upside down or reverse them horizontally - it's like a magic mistake-finding trick!

Rotating a painting is something my professors suggested when the class was working on oil paintings.  I did it a few times but eventually stopped because I wasn't seeing the benefit.  But, after watching a few videos on digital painting technique, I noticed that nearly all of the artists flip their work - usually several times during the process - so I decided I must be missing something and gave it another try... They were right, it works wonders!

Today I worked on this painting entirely flipped this way:

  

 

This is the current version flipped horizontally so I've fixed some of the errors, but it allowed me to see that the paint on the mountains was splotchy, the waves needed some work to be more defined, and the ships were blending in to the ocean, along with some lighting issues on the figures that needed to be addressed.  Clearly, I should have tried this a long time ago!

Here's the current version in the correct orientation:

  

And, here's last week's for comparison:

The differences are probably pretty subtle, but hopefully there is some noticeable improvement.  There are still a few more adjustments I want to make, just to tighten everything up, but should be done soon!