November 21, 2011

Then and Now

For little over a year now I have been reworking designs I did early in my carrier when I worked in TV. You might wonder why I am doing such a thing. It all started when I was talking to a friend about my time working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I could not remember a demon I had working on. I went back to my files to remind myself and dug up the design and I was horrified. Absolutely HORRIFIED.

I felt compelled to correct this travesty of design. What started as an attempt to sooth a bruised ego eventually became a fun and cathartic exercise to see how I would approach concept problems today versus 8-7 years ago. In time, I realized that in many ways I was creating something I wish I had seen so many years ago when I was desperate to improve my abilities. In a time when it felt like everyone around me was so much better and had always been so much better it would have been nice to see peoples less then amazing work.

It takes time and hard work to improve and advance. After doing this art thing for most of the last 12 years in varying degrees of stressfulness it is reassuring to see that maybe I have been heading down the right path, and that if you are a artist just starting out, that if you stick with it, you too can look back and be horrified by your early work.

2002 / 2010

2003 / 2010

2003 / 2010

2003 / 2011

2003 / 2011

2003 / 2011

2003 / 2011

2003 / 2011

2003 / 2011

7 comments:

  1. Great progression Chris! You're a brave man, I buried all my old work, and really hope that it doesn't rise like the living dead to haunt me. The Grox' Lar demon is a really cool re-imagining, that must have been fun.

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  2. Thanks, Craig! For a long time I desperately tried to hide away my old work but at some point in the last year and a half I decided I have nothing to be ashamed of and realized it could make for a good educational tool. I am mentoring a student and I found him going through so much that I had gone through. It caused me to go back to my old work and look upon it with fresh eyes.

    I can now produce the images I had so desperately wanted to do back then. It is a humbling, exciting, fun experience. I just hope it can show that it does take time and hard work, but you can improve and advance and it is something we all have to go through. :)

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  3. thanks for sharing these. i think it's also useful to look back on older work to be reminded of good things we've *forgotten*, too. i was just looking through some old pieces myself (since someone asked me about one of them over email) and was kind of shocked by the looseness i left in some portions of my work. more painting marks, rather than more overall attempts at verisimilitude of real textures. it'd be good to get some of that back. at least now when i know what i'm doing (at least a bit more than i did, anyway :)

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  4. Chris- God damn! So many re-designs :) They look awesome, man. I was considering trying something like this out myself. I'm with Craig though, all of my old work is buried and hopefully will never ever see the light of day again ;) These look bad ass!

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  5. Thanks guys! I plan to rework all the stuff I did for Buffy and Angel in the fullness of time. I work on them over lunch or when I have a little down time or need a break. I think there is something we can learn from our (and others) early work, especially when compared to their current work. It still freaks me out when I realize I still do some of the same things when I draw, even though I have tried to get rid of all those bad habits :P

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  6. Reminds of how Claire Wendling revisited her old drawings. Nice updates!

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