I feel like canvas flipping doesn't get talked about a lot in the art community, especially with beginning artists who are just now venturing into digital art. What is canvas flipping and why do it? Canvas flipping is inverting your canvas so you can see any mistakes that you might not have noticed otherwise. How often do you guys flip your canvas? Has it helped you? I try to flip my canvas quite often. I never did for a good few years because I was just starting out and not really big into the art community. But it definitely has helped my art a lot.
I flip my canvas all the time! I usually do one sketch, flip the canvas, and do a second sketch over the first sketch. This helps eliminate mistakes early on before I actually start lining.
All the time. It's a pretty important thing for me, top of my priority list actually when it comes to drawing stuff. When drawing, you probably unconsciously will draw towards a certain angle due to various quirks of your dominant hand. While it may look natural unflipped (since your dominant hand often goes along with your dominant eye) when you flip the canvas, the perspective of things is often askew (You are quite literally looking at things from a different angle). This is especially prevalent when drawing people. Just an example using an older drawing of mine. Spoiler: Flipped vs Unflipped: Unflipped first This is the face of one of my OC Trainers on an unflipped canvas. It looks relatively okay from this angle (Probably, >_>) Spoiler: Flipped. This is her flipped. Right away, I can tell that something is very, very off with her eye position (one is higher and further away from the center of her face. Her sunglasses are also skewed and don't line up with the shadows cast below. (That, and it's easier to see that the glasses' frames aren't symmetrical.) Flipping a canvas is easy to do digitally, but if you do traditional, I recommend just turning your paper over while still in the sketch stage and holding it up to a light.
When I first started doing digital art I never flipped the canvas and even now I still don't. I know it's supposed to help you find mistakes but I don't really get much use from it??? I feel like I cant easily spot out mistakes without flipping (im really picky about my art) and the viewer's only gonna see the piece from the angle I present it from. It just doesn't help me all that much so I just ignore it........
I only just started canvas flipping, and even then its just to help draw the non-dominant side. Not yet adjusting to actually drawing flipped
The thing about canvas flipping is that it shows you what other people see when they look at your art. Other people's art might not look any different from the flipped and non flipped image to you but to them they'll see all the mistakes because their eyes will have gotten used to what they're drawing. So flipping it gives them a new view with fresh eyes. So I use it a lot! I want to make sure what I see is the same as what I'm presenting to my viewers! I do it after scanning in an image, and as I photoshop and one last flip at the end just to check.
