I recently found my old sketchbooks from middle school and high school. Back then, I remember thinking my art was pretty good. I would get compliments on them too (and not just from my mom.)
Looking at them now, I see how raw my skills were, how little I knew. Rough sketches of keyboards, characters from my favorite shows, still life sketches, all drawn with a heavy hand. Not to belittle my younger inexperienced self. I don’t see his (my) work as terrible or cringe-worthy. It’s more nostalgic than anything.
A big part of creative work, be it art, film, music, or writing… is progressing to new levels of understanding and seeing.
At each stage, we use the knowledge and experience we’ve got to work with. It’s only until we reach a new level of understanding that we glimpse the flaws in our previous work. No—not flaws. It’s more like we go from standard definition to high definition, and then from HD to 4K, and so on.
SD only looks blurry and muddy in retrospect. At the time, it was sharp to our inexperienced eyes.
When you look at your previous work and see the flaws and what you would do differently, then you are in a good place. Because you’re able to observe what you couldn’t before shows how much progress you’ve made.
Every new level of understanding is a new level of seeing.
