Thoughts and feelings on your old/beginner artwork?

[boreal_cryptid]

i actually like my old art a lot.

not in a sense of skill - i just remember how much more freedom i've felt that time. i didn't think about improving anything - i just used it to express forms from my head, emotions and funny little life situations.

i love art studies, but i feel like i became more strict. i demand a lot from myself now. my standards sometimes are suffocating and discouraging.

i try to be aware of this, and remind myself that my art is for me first. always.

[xwindows]

For me, it is actually somewhat varied between categories.

Unlike many amateur artists who would spontaneously release works-in-progress or unpolished spontaneous pieces; I do it differently by setting quite a high ("perfectionist" (1)) bar of my artwork to pass, in order for me to release that for the public consumption.

As a result, I still rotate many of my past (sometimes decade-old) publicly-released works as my own desktop wallpapers, and still feel chic every time I see it as get on with my day on my computer. (2)(3)

However, if that particular work hadn't got published to the public yet, I basically see them as unfinished work-in-progress; and since I version-control my artworks, there is nothing too late to fix. Instead of being cringey stain of the past, they represent my hope and dream to polish these up, and get them out for everyone to see... someday.

Oh, and there is another completely different category: practice artworks (for sake of practice), which I used to make in number in my earliest years in digital illustrations. These are never intended to be published, and I don't have strong feelings when flipping through them. (4)


(1) My bar of "perfect" is normally "I couldn't make it better beyond this point" and "I could proudly sit in public with that work as my desktop wallpaper". If any of that failed, then that piece is not getting published.

(2) And this even include one manifesto artwork which I made my persona sit on huge mountain of trash... in style.

(3) There are some exceptions, first are artworks which clash too much with my current desktop color scheme (very bright one, which obviously don't go well with my dark desktop theme), and second had been a specific every-early artwork which actually met my standard (1) at the time but my expectation in that area had changed significantly that I now only considered it half-decent.

(4) The approach I'm using for "practicing" nowadays is also different; instead of making "disposable" practice drawings for each new technique, to raise the stake for myself (and minimize the wasted effort), I now "practice" by actually using my upcoming "real" artwork as playground for applying such new technique, and force myself to polish them to the point of being release-worthy; to a mixed success.