Redoing your own old work?

[Joseph]

Before getting into the question in the thread title...

Wow! Five months since the last post in this thread. What a committed, creative bunch we are. Whatever happened to Firstborn's "poem a month" promise? And wow again. I did a double take when I saw how many threads of AKJ's were on the first page of this sub-forum.

Anyhow, I was just going through the site, old ezines, feeling nostalgic, enthused about the next issue, embarrassed about some of our weaker bits, proud of our good ones, that kind of thing. But the really strong feeling that lead to this post was "Oh man, I really, really want to edit this or redo that and Sweet Jesus, that image looks really baaad!" I know it's not just me. Every creative does it.

So... not that we'll get much response (Lina, Joe, Jez, Michael, anyone else?) but how often have any of you looked back on some older examples of your work, say a piece you wrote, or edited, or whatever, and it was good, or good enough, at the time and cringed internally months or years later?

[Gorth]

Does miniature painting count?

[AngryKidJoe]

I always find flaws in everything I create. No matter how much I work on it, I find more. When I finally am fed up with it; I compare it to the original and scrap the one with all of the 'improvements.'

[Gorth]

You lost me there Joe. When comparing to the "original", is that the original of something you created in the past?

There are probably two seperate thngs in play, one is inspiration and one is the improving of technical skills. You can improve your skills and get better technically over time, but inspiration is not something you can do on demand. It either comes to you from who knows where or it doesn't. I look at some of my old paint jobs (above mentioned miniatures) and think about how I would go about something I did 15-20 years ago. I might be technically better at the shading, highlighting and fine detail freehand painting, but I might not come up with the same colour and theme ideas as I did for a particular miniature back then.

[Joseph]

Gorth, think back to school papers. First draft, second draft, final copy. While I could be wrong, I'm quite certain that's what AKJ means.

And after all these years of knowing each other it feels silly still calling each other by our forum names.