What do you do with your REALLY old art?

[skyfarron]

I've almost finished my comic collage, assembling my old comics from 2007-2019.

The Grim Archives | Tapas

For each comic, although very few of them were finished, I took whatever art was there for each panel from either the digital file or the existing paper draft, and stuffed them into fresh panels with new speech bubbles, sometimes rewriting the entire script.

The cover pages got the most work, with new lighting effects and fonts to really bring out the piece's best look.

Example: Darkside II (2009)

What about you guys?

[FafasMcMelt]

i just hoard it like a fucking dragon

[TedGravesArt]

I think I've got a bunch of old stuff stored away on my NAS somewhere. I've considered just tossing it, since it takes up a lot of space, and I'm never going to use it again. I still might. Always making something new and better!

[Kelheor]

It's laying in my deep dark cave waiting for its time to be redrawn in 5-10-20 years

[Crusoe]

A lot of old stuff that I posted online from years ago is still up on amino and Wattpad and deviant art, but I've abandonned those accounts really. All of my old art I've stashed under my bed at my parents house cus I don't live there anymore and there's not a lot of room in my student house.

[geofflowe]

I keep all my old writing and it can be useful to check back on old ideas to see if there's potential. It can be a kind of creative challenge to repurpose old stuff. Reduce, reuse, recycle!

[DreamyPastel]

I have kept just about everything from 3rd to today. It's a whole pile of papers, old sketchbooks, and some other things I drew in.
I especially like keeping most of my work for the nostalgia factor; it brings me right back to where I was, how I was, and what I was thinking when I drew that doodle or art. As someone who can't remember the majority of middle school and parts of elementary, it really helps me remember which is great.
I also love keeping all of my old oc work. I often have to go back and look through those if I'm thinking about their character design, any lore I wrote down somewhere else, or for inspiration. I don't think my characters would be as fleshed out if I didn't have their original drawings to reflect upon and add to.
Wrote a lot more to this than I needed to whoops-

[Rhonder]

I still have almost everything from when I was in elementary school onwards lol. A few specific drawings and comics I've lost track of, but I have a few drawers full of childhood drawings. One fun exercise that I recently did for a video I was recording was to put together a little montage of my experience with the "redo loop" with my first "original" comic that I wrote in middle school. From ~10:12 to 11:40 plays a sequence where I show off like 10 versions of the same comic spanning from 2007 to 2017 xD

I only started doing primarily digital art in 2019 so much of my art history is physical and in those aforementioned drawers lol

[WoollyPAR]

I keep it so I can look at it and go "I used to suck, but now I'm awesome" and it makes me feel better

[DualDragons]

That depends, the traditional art rots somewhere in my closet while the digital ones get lost in time

[Legendofgenii]

Pre-dropbox it just disappeared whenever my computers died.

[BlairFujin]

Well... there's still stuff back from middle school on my deviantart (I'm 27) and even if I felt like removing it, that would be way too much of a hassle (I'm almost at 2000 deviations ;p). All that stuff just sits there (recently got comissioned because of an 8 year old pic, so who knows, maybe it'll happen again?) but I sometimes dig something up for a redraw
for example

[jkb4753]

I was going through my old art, and I found this note my sister (age 10 at the time) wrote to me when I was in highschool. It reads: "I don't have a boyfriend, and I am a drawing freak." addressed to me from my sister. Absolutely roasted.

[jkb4753]

Holy shit the redraw? Your middle school self would probably die if they saw this.

[Kelheor]

Most relatable note ever

[nathanKmcwilliams]

It's all on the bottom two shelves there XD that's my art from 2008-16. Anything earlier...I've got no idea.

[skyfarron]

@nathanKmcwilliams
VEGETA!

@jkb4753
Same

@Rhonder
That's really good advice, the first comic I finished in 2013 was five pages long. Before that I'd usually stop around fifteen.

[InkRoseArt]

they get sent to the Folder of Shame

[jcmraz]

I keep them for myself. I have my first comic series from 2005-2006 ish still with me. The stuff I have digital copies of I have on my computer. A bunch of old, unfinished comics are still online. My big one from my mid-twenties was on Smackjeeves so not online anymore. I've considered reuploading it lol Probably not worth it though considering it's unfinished and I don't plan on returning to it. At least not in the form I left it.

[jkb4753]

just completely brutal. destroyed. no reason to go that hard on a post it note.