Good evening! For those of you on this site that happen to do art of your own--and I suppose for those that don't, as well--I'd like to take a moment of your time to discuss mirroring: flipping your artwork so that its left and right edges are reversed. It may sound somewhat odd, but it can be quite beneficial in helping you improve your work, or notice inconsistencies that are detrimental to it. This is something that visual artists can utilize regardless of their chosen medium. If you happen to be a traditional artist, you can use a small mirror--you'll have to aim it at specific targets in the work itself if you happen to be strapped for space, but for a digital artist it's as simple as selecting 'flip canvas'.

It's a fairly painless technique, and you'd be amazed by the sorts of mistakes you can notice via flipping artwork. Part of the issue is due to most of us--myself included--working with our artwork at an angle that doesn't match the angle of our vision. If you've ever drawn a figure on a flat desk, only for it to appear elongated when you hold it up to your face, this may very well be the reason why. Alongside this, you become used to viewing your work from its original orientation over time, which can make a person blind to errors.

Mirroring is quite useful if your work involves symmetry of some kind--things like eyes, lips, ears, horns, etc., so if you are producing a lot of character-based work, I'd highly suggest mirroring your work from time to time to make sure everything lines up properly.

Hope this proves beneficial to someone!

Ya know, that's something that I learned back in junior college when I took figure drawing classes there, but really haven't done since I transitioned into digital media. I've definitely noticed that I have problems looking for issues in my artwork once I've been working on it for hours on end. It's really weird what the brain does after you've been staring at the same thing for so long, and I think that this is probably a really easy way to fix that little quirk.

That's a great tip, and I'll try to do it on all my art work since it's so darn easy. Thanks for sharing!

I'd never heard of this one before. *files it away for future usefulness* Thanks for the tip!

Some programs (eg. MyPaint, Krita) also have an option to flip and/or rotate the -view-, which is better if you have it (doesn't consume memory/undo stack)

Thanks for the reminder.
(I thought this would be a topic about the value of uploading your art to multiple sites) , actually)

it took me way too long to learn regularly flip my work while i draw it but thank god i learned to flip my work anout very fith minute at least while i am working on the sketch because it has saved me from many embarrassing mistakes

Tokaido said:
Ya know, that's something that I learned back in junior college when I took figure drawing classes there, but really haven't done since I transitioned into digital media. I've definitely noticed that I have problems looking for issues in my artwork once I've been working on it for hours on end. It's really weird what the brain does after you've been staring at the same thing for so long

It's not unlike dealing with an essay for a class. It's easy to end up being so used to staring at it whilst writing it that we don't realize what errors have been made until someone else proofreads it. It definitely helped me a bunch, though!

As savageorange pointed out, there are various programs with a built-in option to flip the canvas. Manga Studio has this feature as well. o.o/ Glad this proved helpful, though!

I've watched other artists do this but I never really thought about it until now. Thanks! I will make sure to utilize this.

Just used this to notice some huuuge perspective errors in a sketch, and it reminded me that there is another part to this:

Flipping your references as well.

Ideally, your viewer can flip or rotate the -view- of them rather than the actual image data, but if not, most image viewers include functions to flip or rotate the image.
sxiv is my favorite image viewer and the only one I've encountered that includes view transformation, oddly enough.

Mmmm, pancakes…