The evolution of a digital painting

So I'm taking this digital painting course and really enjoying it -- I was totally new to Corel Painter and still am far from expert (or even intermediate), but it's exciting to be trying out a new program.  At the same time, I'm taking a real-life watercolor class, so it's very interesting to see how similar and different the two media are.

I've done a few projects so far, but I thought I'd share my process on one for those thinking of getting into digital art.  I wanted to do a digital watercolor of a photograph I took a couple of years ago at Mission San Miguel, a place I enjoy visiting when traveling up and down the California coast.  Here's the original photo:

I love this photo so much that a textured version is featured on my business card.   At this point, I could have cloned a painting from the photo in Painter, and would have gotten a very pale image that you then can paint over (kind of like paint-by-numbers).  Or, I could have chosen "auto-painting," and gotten something like this:

I stopped the process part-way through so you could see how it fills in the painting, stroke by stroke, and if you're super-good at setting the autopainting up (which I am not), it can come out looking very good.  But that wouldn't be something I painted, so I don't want to do that.  Instead, I began by making the painting into a sketch:

A little hard to see, but I think  you can get the idea -- Painter creates a sketch that you then can paint over, on a blank layer (or many layers) placed on top.  (Note: I have no worries about the sketch being "cheating" -- even Rembrandt had some kind of system (mirrors, lenses) that would project whatever he was painting onto the canvas.) So this is what I leapt in and started to do.  I did clone colors from the photograph, so as not to spend all my time mixing colors and comparing them to the photograph.  After many hours I was maybe 50% done, and it looked like this:

Pretty sketchy, right?  And you can still see the sketch is very much part of the painting.  The colors are blotchy and not blended well, but I wanted to get the idea of it (and turn in my required 50% version).  I had another week to make it perfect.  I messed with the colors some more, figured out how to blend them together (that was hard to figure out) put in a lot more details, went back to the sketch layer and erased most of it, worked on the lighting and then went back over everything with a fine-toothed comb.  What I ultimately came out with is this.  I'll include the original again so you don't have to scroll back:

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What do you think?  I think it came out pretty well, especially for a first-time watercolor on Painter.  We'll see what my teacher thinks!