As part of an online art course I'm taking, there was a suggestion to take an old art piece of yours and draw it again - keeping all elements the same, but repairing things like anatomy/pose issues and using techniques you know now to make the image look like the rest of your current artwork.

I chose this drawing from high school (and edited out the Savage Garden song lyrics I thought made the image complete... sigh) of a weird little purple mouse fairy I designed years ago.

This was an eye-opening exercise.Things like this really put talent vs. effort into perspective. I'm often told how talented I am, and while I am immensely flattered, this is proof that art, like any skill, is a lot of work and practice. This improvement is 13 years of drawing in margins, sketching, making messes and drawing really badly sometimes. While drawing the new one, I didn't like a lot of aspects of it. But when I was done, I compared it to the original and my jaw dropped.