Do you ever look back at old work and think…..blech? That’s been happening a lot lately as I’ve been updating my website/shop/social media accounts. I ended up putting some current projects on hold (definitely not procrastinating!) while I reworked some pieces that I felt had potential but that I wasn’t satisfied with.
Two Horses
I started with this one of two horses that I did as an experiment back in 2018 using pastels on black paper.
I liked the overall composition and the contrast of the white horses against the black background, but I remember struggling a lot with the pastels to get the level of detail I wanted. I decided to see what I could do with it in Procreate. I started by scanning and uploading the original drawing to my iPad, then basically painted over it, adding more details and cleaning it up.
I’ve been focusing a lot on studying light and shadow recently, and wanted to use some of the techniques I’ve learned to bring in stronger lighting to the piece. (If you’re interested I highly recommend the online course Mastering Lighting and Shading through 21Draw!) The highlights provide a nice contrast against the black background, and help the details to pop more.
I’m really happy with how it turned out! It had been awhile since I’d worked on a photorealistic piece, and it was a nice change of pace from the projects I’ve been doing lately. It’s always gratifying to see improvement in areas I’ve been making an effort to work on, which motivates me to keep practicing!
Giraffe
This giraffe was another piece I just couldn’t leave alone. The original started as an early experiment with colored pencil “painting” techniques. The result was okay, but not great Although I eventually got the hang of the technique, I just couldn’t leave this one as a casualty of learning. Instead of redrawing it from scratch, I followed the same process I described for the horse, then changed the orientation from horizontal to vertical, and ended up with this:
I’m much happier with it now!
Do you ever rework old art? Do you find it to be helpful? Let me know in the comments!
Update: Prints of these are now available here!