Giving yourself a Mulligan

So, Lately I have been pretty unhappy with some of my early art having been rusty and not familiar with computer graphic soft wear at the time I started back drawing.
It’s just little things like a nose that’s off, or not there at all, bust lines unintentionally exaggerated. Hair lines off, or face structure not consistent.
Even confusing dialogue which can be corrected with an additional word, comma, apostrophe or hyphen.
During the production of my Flag Ship strip Randi; I designed the characters on the fly - as I did the daily pencils.
They now have morphed or evolved to where (some 80 pages in) I am happy with how they look. But some are a shadow of there former self.
For the last few days I have been going back over the art, making list of corrections then making the modifications. Sometimes it takes as little as a minute, sometimes up to 15.
I do feel better about it after I reload the strips, but then I always seem to fine MORE stuff :(
Is it ME? Am I being too anal? Does everybody doing art go through this? I’d be interested to hearing how you view your early stuff and if anyone else has gone back and made changes to such.
Thanks
Tiki_Carol

i havent gone back and made lists of what was wrong with my older art, but hell yeah it happens. you change, you improve. it keeps happening. i've started PM over so many times before it was on DD that i cant even count, ya woukldnt believe how different this shit was, in art and story. i know it can be stressful cuz after a while you go "am i gonna keep changing my shit?" but eventually you get to a point where you can roll with it. remeber, great artists that seem to do everything perfect have human minds like you and me, and they came up the same way, alot of practise. they just gained alot of confidence and experience along the way. and that's what you're gaining, experience. being able to go back and spot your own mistakes says something. just dont let it get to ya so much that it rattles you. i find alot of times too, you might look at yer own art alot closer than other people will look at yer art. what you see as a design flaw, they might embrace as stylization.and if it REALLY bugs you, you change it. anyways, enough of my lecture.

I go through my archives about every month or so, and I'm in the process of putting the first chapter for print. And I don't get to worked up over it, yet I did redo a few panels for the comic book. My biggest mistake was that I never created a character reference sheet for my characters before I started my comic. This caused my biggest gripes with my own work, as characters didn't look consistent all the time from page to page. So that was the main reason that I redid a few panels.

But you can't change everything, its sometimes best to accept it for what it is and move forward.

My old art is eye-bleeding awful. I knew that years ago, and my archives were already too big (and my ideas too numerous) to go back and attempt to rescue anything. I chose instead to push forward. I'm glad I did because now I look at what I drew back when I wanted to change my old stuff, and THAT stuff looks like unbearable crap. And I figure in a year, what I'm drawing now will be stuff I want to burn and never look at again.

So, I imagine if I had gone back to redraw or fix things back then. I'd have had to go back and fix those. And then go back and fix those. And all my ideas would rot in my head, never being able to push forward as I fall into a horrible sisyphean fate of ever-correcting. Since I don't publish and have no delusions of professionalism, and my goal is to tell my story, I'll press forward. My ugly drawings and over-sights, when I can stomach them, are my badge of improvement.

Now, if I see a fixable error on a recent page, I'll fix it. The extent of the error I'll fix is proportional to the recentness of the page. If I uploaded it within the last week, I'd be willing to redraw entire panels sometimes. Spelling errors have a few months (maybe even a year) grace period. But if I see a missing comma 500 pages ago, the grammar guardians are out of luck. Besides, those malformed mutants have bigger problems than splitting infinitives or dangling participles, and I'm too busy creating their futures.



That's for my case, though. If your art is consistent now and/or you want to publish and develop a consistent look for your work -- and your desire for a nice overall work overpowers your need to keep pushing forward, go for it.

I know exactly what are you talking about.
Most blatant example is looking at your preeschool princess drawing and remembering how you tought it was masterpiece at that time =)
That means your artistic maturity and ability do observe real life is constantly improving,and that you are growing as an artist.And when you haven't looked in one of your drawings in a period of time,you get emotionally detached to it,and you can observe it objectivly,like other people when they see it for the first time.
And yes,I know what it means when your characters "became shadows of their former selves".I did found my 3-4 year old comic recently,and I could barely recognise who the characters were suppose to be.But the good thing was my drawings were flat and stiff as Total Drama Island,and I'm awfully glad we artists have that ability to constantly improve and evolve.
My art did drasticly improve when I started drawing with constructions and principles so I have a lot bigger control over character's poses and consistancy.

But don't be afraid of facial inconsistency or slight asymmetry =)
Facial expressions are very important in storytelling and I always add very subtle assymetry to faces to give them more human quality.

About the issue of redoing pages:I think that it's only necessary if the art was very messy in the beggining,or the lettering was hand drawn scribble hard to read.
Otherwise,you will just get in a vicious circle every few months cause you will constantly see mistakes.And it's very interesting to see art evolution of a comic.
Don't beat yourself over it =)

I've redone the first few pages. I'd rather concentrate on the ongoing stuff and not worry to much about the old stuff.
However if I decide I'd want to put my stuff into print. I'd definetly redo many many pages.