Illustration Teardowns: Refactoring Old Work
We all hate to look at our old work. Yuk! Blech! But as songwriters say “it’s all in the rewrite”!
As I come up close to the end of my current contract I find myself in that “what’s next” place where I need to get out and promote myself some more. I elected to finally come back here to have a look at my various illustration teardowns articles on Medium. Yikes, I was aghast at many of my older illustrations! Why had I left old work of this quality up for the world to see!? I had to do something about it…
When I used to dabble in songwriting I can recall going to a “song pitch” and a music publisher said “it’s all in the rewrite” and urged young songwriters to not get too precious about their first drafts. He explained that crafting the perfect lyric and melody rarely happened on the first revision.
My experience as a software engineer was similar—if you want a high code quality codebase, you’re going to need to spend some time refactoring code.
So I realized recently that I need to apply this same approach to my illustration work, and have begun to go back and refactor my older illustration work. Although at first, it was unsettling, I’m starting to rather enjoy it for the following reasons:
- there’s usually “something” good and interesting about the original raw idea that’s still worth exploring
- it’s nice to see how much I’ve grown
- some of these reworks could actually turn out very nicely!
Reworking an illustration happens in a sort of trance state, and so it’s hard to capture that process entirely, but I do have some notes. Let’s start with the illustration you’ve seen at the top of this post…
This illustration was originally used (and still is) for my article on focal point. I always liked the colors and overall direction, but there were some things that really bother me looking at it now. I’ve stacked at the top: my work-in-progress refactor, and at the bottom: the original with annotations on the problem areas:
On the top illustration, the oval shows that as I moved my water flow things around, I’d left a weird shape!
On the bottom, so many things bothered me (from left to right):
- The shape of the hill with the abrupt change in direction; the weird chunk of texture that all of the sudden was missing (you might have to zoom in to see).
- The swimming pool structure was completely out of perspective with the back sitting up way too high. Some wonkiness is forgiven in these sort of graphical illustrations, but it works better if its purposeful—this really just felt like a mistake. So I brought it way down. Making this change actually had the benefit of showing some more of the waterline below the hill and houses on the right side bring some more interest to the composition.
- The iPad perspective slant was a bit too extreme and needed to be “shaved down” a bit.
- The orange on top of the shoes bother me. Looking at old work you sometimes know what you were thinking—in this case, I somehow thought I was using color harmony by using the orange in several places. But her hair achieves that already and visual weight drawing the eye to the shoes was more of a detriment than gain.
- The stylization of her face is, of course, a silhouetted style that is not at all trying to achieve realism. However, I’ve grown to feel that unless you’re really going for a graphical, geometric, or caricature-styled face, it might as well have some semblance of reality enough to be pleasing to the eye. So I fixed it—it still may be too graphical or cartoony for some, but I find it much more pleasing to the eye.
- One thing I did not annotate is that I added some white highlights in certain places to make the shapes pop a bit more.
I’ll have to live with this illustration for a while, but I’m definitely much, much happier with it and feel much better showing it in my body of work 😊 Oh, just a reminder the refactored version is at the top of this post!
This is the original illustration from my illustration teardown article on layout:
Here are the things that bothered me (left to right):
- The hill shapes are sort of all over the place and there’s already enough organic shapes in the lower quadrant (which is where I’d prefer to draw the eye — that’s where the figures and focal point is supposed to be!).
- That hand on her chest—is it hers or his 😲 (it is hers but it’s not so clear from this distance). You’ll see hopefully that I solved this in the refactored image, but here’s what I did. I made the outline around her arm a bit more pronounced and gave a more definitive shadow there too. For the man, I added a hand that peers through from behind her to show that he is leaning back slightly. This hopefully shows that, no, his hand is NOT on her chest!
- The green buildings on the right were just sloppy looking to me, and the man on the bench looked ominous, and overall, this section of the image was serving nothing to help to my mind. I’ve left the bench for interest, but pretty much removed the rest of it.
- After removing so much stuff from the right side, I realized the image would be better served with some sort of framing—so I added some tree trunks.
- Also, I elected to make the background shapes more geometric to lean the illustration a bit more towards the graphical aesthetic. I could have very well just fixed up the organic shapes with more purposeful s-curves or even irregular “tree bumps”, etc., but I liked this more geometric direction to offset a lot of organically drawn shapes in the foreground. Choices!
- I added some gradient textures. If I’m gonna make this raster, I might as well, right?!
- I shifted all the branches and pink flowers to the one side and repainted their contours more cleanly.
Here’s the refactored version:
This is the original illustration from my illustration teardown article on background details:
I still like the mood and graphical feel to it, but things that bothered me still were (from left to right):
- The s-curve bending to the left on the staircase where I’ve annotated with the oval seems odd — I think it should be bowing the other way. Also, it would be nice if the stairs were sort of wrapping up and to the left as they vanish. Might also be opportunities to add a bit of texture to the steps too.
- The girl’s long hair is sort of long, unnatural, and without purpose. I’m going to try to have it flowing as if the momentum and/or wind is pushing it back.
- I don’t have it annotated, but the dark tunnel she’s coming from (or dark walls) just doesn’t seem that compelling to me. If I remove those and use a more masked look utilizing the archway there’s a nice opportunity to have this be used as more of a spot illustration that blends in with the article’s white background (as you see below in the refactored version).
I do call this series of posts illustration teardowns, so I figured it was about time I do a teardown on my own work 😊 I hope my willingness to self-deprecate a bit here while also celebrating my improved reworking has somehow been helpful to you. I’d love to know if so!
Do you have any work you’d like to have a chance to do over? Do you think it’s even worth the time to revisit old work? I’d love to hear in the comments if so!
Rob Levin is a freelance illustrator. Portfolio: https://roblevin.myportfolio.com/ For illustration work enquiries, collaboration, or to say hi: roblevinillustration@gmail.com.
Also, you may like to read more of the illustration teardowns articles.
