>>7682430
Well listen anon, to make a sincere post for a second, a big thing most artists fail at whenever they do these "before and after" comparison pics is that they conflate "style" and "design" as the same thing. They think to themselves whenever they look at their old art "Oh dude Ive been studying for years I can put out way better art then this" and try to do an old piece again but the pit that they fall into is that they just default to whatever they were doing currently without actually thinking about the choices they made in the past and how they can translate that to a better drawing.
Like look at OP's image, from a design perspective these two are not the same character, her eyes are shrunken to a more realistic shape(for anime anyway) smaller mouth, more sharp angles, it honestly looks like a Love Live character cosplaying as the girl in the previous drawing and NOT like the old design but just "better" and when she called out by her fans she clearly realized that and responded with this drawing
>>7680722
which incorporates the same design elements but drawn with more confidence and better sensibilities.
Even when you are a complete beg who doesnt understand shit like anatomy, shape language or whatever, when you are making those early drawings there is still intent, there is still a reason why you decided to do that eye shape or that hairstyle and those colors, so if you as an artist want to approach a previous subject matter you shouldnt just shit something out by default, you should think WHY you decided to draw what you did back then and make it better.
For me the big red pill on thinking about design and "muh style" as separate things was reading pic related. In it it talks about how different animators approached animating characters, and the author was going on about "this artist drew the character like this and this one drew it like that" even though its the same design, but thats cause he wasnt talking about design, it was the approach.
