Your GFX: Then & Now

[Miko]

Pardonay the lame title of this thread. I've mentioned interest about making this thread but haven't until now because I'm lazy

I came across some very old signatures I made back in-between 2005-2009 and cringed my little heart out. I know a common trend artists like to do is take their old art & redo it again in their current style and I thought that sounded kinda cool and wanted to do a few myself here in the future.

So here's the thread if anyone feels like participating. I'm not expecting it to get flooded with replies, especially not right away, but if you made something a while ago feel free to give it your go at recreating something you made and posting it down below.



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Here's my recent attempt on how I would have made this signature differently today:


Then: 2005-2008~

Now: 2021

This was a request from someone a long time ago (I don't even remember this person) that went by 'Thief Zidane', hence the animated text. I went ahead and just changed it to 'Zidane Tribal' since that part didn't matter anymore (despite Garnet being the more focal point lol.) I'm not sure what the exact specifications were, so I tried incorporating the same images I used & omitted the tacky animated font. I tried to retain some kind of unique transparency on the border but found the original very... I'm not even sure the border design is original.

Anyway, took some time trying to get the overall background together as opposed to just slapping two images on a background that wasn't even my own and changing the blending mode. I'm not the best graphic designer obviously, but I feel a lot more confident knowing that I at least took time creating the background and blending things more than the top signature, because I'm pretty sure I just slapped Zidane & Garnet on a background someone else made & changed the blending mode and called it a day. The animated text was cool back in the day because I figured it out on my own without looking up help, but it's just not what I'd do now unless it was specifically asked of me.

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Feel free to comment, but I hope some of you take time in the future to update your own Then & Now art, as I'm really interested in seeing how far some of you have come

 

[Miko]

Decided to tackle a new one!


Then: 2005-2008~

Now: 2022

I vaguely remember making the original for once, actually. I recall spending a lot of time on the background & trying out different blending techniques, which kinda worked out the same with the revamp. I changed 'The Dark Paladin' to 'Kain Highwind' since the member this signature was originally for is no longer needed for this instance. The text is... well, look, I'm trying. I had like 5 different grouped text layers at one time & really had a struggle. It's a step up from where I was, and probably could have been executed better, but I had everything else 'done' for a week+ because I kept dragging my feet on the text. So there.

I loved doing these smaller more narrow sigs back in the day, and I kinda miss that sometimes! But larger signatures are more in & there's more room to actually make it look nice. For Kain I actually had a render I found online, but the hair was.... something else, let me tell you. So I went in & Frankensteined it up to be a little bit nicer. I see some imperfections on this as well, but you don't so that's okay o_o

And, well, yeah. Just added some accents here & there and tried to make Kain more blended into the background and bring out some of those darker tones. I'm pretty happy with the result considering the original, so I'll take that as a win. It's a lot of fun doing these! I hope some of the others try it out, at least just once!

Thanks for looking!

 

[Morrigan]

I love your idea of redoing old sigs! It's also crossed my mind seeing some of my old stuff here , that have now been watermarked by Photobucket.

I also do it a lot with my sketches and put them side by side to compare and see the difference and progress.

I also loved narrow sigs for some time, I dunno why. Now I'm also more into bigger sigs for some reason. Perhaps more space to do fit in more stuff? Who knows.

It's quite a good job rendering those hair strands, I can just imagine how time-consuming it can be.

One idea I would also like to try (though a bit off-topic) is creating those Youtube channel banners or twitch GFX. I don't even use Twitch but it'd be fun, since forums seem to be so much rarer now.