Painting Metamorphosis

In January I took a Maritime painting class. I didn't get much out of the class other than the suggestion to mix up you major colors before you start painting. That, however, has made my process so much easier. I came out of the class with 2 crappy paintings. One was completely obliterated and painted crimson and turned into the Dahlia painting. The other I was trying to salvage for a short while but it didn't work out too well... so then I went drastic.

Here is the sucky sea-scape I did:

Look how ugly it is! There's no focus, the color is all wrong and the clouds look like someone took a giant blue crap on the canvas. That's what i get for taking a class where the teacher works in oils and I'm working in acrylics. I also used an ugly reference photo.

So a week ago, I went drastic. I brought the clouds more into my realm of what I normally do. Feels so much better. Then the lime-yellow green on the edges (inspired by a color of the pajamas I was wearing at the time) really makes this look sharp, especially since I added that color in as accents in the water.

in my opinion, a successful metamorphosis!