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The Importance of revising old works and learning from them
8 years ago
I realize that there is a big treasure mound of improvement in looking back at older works, works you felt were great when finished but as time goes on and as you improve you then realize something about them is a bit off. You can still learn a thing or two from these older pieces - although one shouldn’t spend too much time revising older works and be quick about it, too much time means you could instead spent that time creating new original works. Doing fast revisions I think will help you avoid repeating those same mistakes again, which is the whole purpose of this exercise. It is like when someone asks you for a paintover of their painting, but this time you ask yourself for a paintover for one of your own paintings. These examples I am posting here shows what I am talking about.
For the examples I talk about, see images here: http://zaggatar.tumblr.com/post/157.....lder-works-and
I noticed and also got critique by friends later on on how my green Sceptile lady was too shiny and reflective in the shaded area of her skin, later on looking at some photos and comparing it I did a quick revision of her and felt that making the shaded area darker and more unified in value had her look more realistic overall. This exercise helped me to avoid doing the same thing in my later works.
In the painting of my vampire dragon bat thing there were something always bugging me about it even after finishing it. As I looked back on it months later, I felt the composition was a bit off and that the saturation of the background competed with the foreground. In an area like this a saturation difference would help the character stand out from the background, and creating a revised image with a desaturated background with some bright light added behind the character helped her stand out more. More work could have been done to revise it further, but I learned my lesson and that is what this is all about.
In the fox and horse painting I got too focused on detail while working on it - so much that I didn’t notice that the values of the image were overall too unified and close to each other. Objects should be separated in value from each other to be either further away or closer to each other, something I realized I didn’t do well enough as it all had the same dark values in the overall composition of values. When I later revised the image I added a soft layer of brighter light on all areas in the image except the legs closest to the viewer and then it all popped out and now I think there is a whole new breath of space to the image, separating the legs from their torsos and heads more then the previous image.
This is just a tip I have personally found working very well for me recently and I learned a lot from my own old paintings doing this and I felt I wanted to share this to people. As long as you learn something new, fix a misconception you had in your art for long and then when you will be able to apply what you learned it is a success. I hope you will learn as much or even more then me from doing this fun little exercise, it also boosts your artistic confidence since you realize you have improved since doing the old pieces!
For the examples I talk about, see images here: http://zaggatar.tumblr.com/post/157.....lder-works-and
I noticed and also got critique by friends later on on how my green Sceptile lady was too shiny and reflective in the shaded area of her skin, later on looking at some photos and comparing it I did a quick revision of her and felt that making the shaded area darker and more unified in value had her look more realistic overall. This exercise helped me to avoid doing the same thing in my later works.
In the painting of my vampire dragon bat thing there were something always bugging me about it even after finishing it. As I looked back on it months later, I felt the composition was a bit off and that the saturation of the background competed with the foreground. In an area like this a saturation difference would help the character stand out from the background, and creating a revised image with a desaturated background with some bright light added behind the character helped her stand out more. More work could have been done to revise it further, but I learned my lesson and that is what this is all about.
In the fox and horse painting I got too focused on detail while working on it - so much that I didn’t notice that the values of the image were overall too unified and close to each other. Objects should be separated in value from each other to be either further away or closer to each other, something I realized I didn’t do well enough as it all had the same dark values in the overall composition of values. When I later revised the image I added a soft layer of brighter light on all areas in the image except the legs closest to the viewer and then it all popped out and now I think there is a whole new breath of space to the image, separating the legs from their torsos and heads more then the previous image.
This is just a tip I have personally found working very well for me recently and I learned a lot from my own old paintings doing this and I felt I wanted to share this to people. As long as you learn something new, fix a misconception you had in your art for long and then when you will be able to apply what you learned it is a success. I hope you will learn as much or even more then me from doing this fun little exercise, it also boosts your artistic confidence since you realize you have improved since doing the old pieces!
My field is 3D - and perhaps revising old Models might be a good thing to do. Updating them after a longer while to make sure their tech and textures look better...
Especially that as technology changes and skill improves, the old models might need those improvements.
- The skin texture (the image you put on a 3D model so it has colors and stuff) can always be re-painted.
- You can always improve the anatomy of the 3D model
- You can experiment with different lighting.
The same revision principles would apply, but the way we do it is different.
this is also why I could never dream of erasing my uploads here, or the ones I have on dA - even my oldest and most shitty work.
You need the perspective: You need to see what you have done, how you have progressed and how your style has changed over time. If you lose track of it, or if you purposely ignore it and delete it... then you're doomed to make the same mistakes over and over.
or your art might even degenerate - since you can lose track of good your art used to be: Being mindful of your past work helps ensure that future work doesn't start to worsen