/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>2641806
Need advice:
My grasp of contrast for saturation is completely out of whack.

Been practicing weekly trying to improve my grasp of lighting and such. What I've noticed is my .... contrast? The overall saturation levels in my work. I end up working in a really narrow window, such that I open up what I was doing the next day and realize it looks like it went through a grey filter or was painted from a reference shrouded in fog. It's an easy "fix" (not really) to just tweak the contrast in post editing, but if I had painted it at that "fixed" contrast in the first place I would have decided it didn't look right in the process of painting it. Yet what looks right in the process of painting it turns out to be too low of contrast when I view it the next day.

Like if I tried to paint pic related without fog, it would end up looking like this grey low contrast when viewing it later, yet while painting it I would have thought it looked fine.

Does my vision calibrate itself while I work on the painting or something? What's throwing me off?