It’s always hard to criticize your own work. Does it look good? Are there any things I should fix? I found the best way to do this, is to set your work as your desktop background. Let it be a design mockup, 3D rendering, photo, vectorization, … This way you get a lot of chance to look at your masterpiece and decide wether you like the look of it or don’t. And when you do, you’ll notice some small details, that you wouldn’t otherwise - this could be any errors that you should fix, or points of interest that you might want to emphasize.

I used this principle a lot when doing car vectorizations. After spending hours making one (The lambo took me about 30 hours I believe) all I could see in them were lines, shapes, gradients, etc. But by using them as background, I could look at them from another perspective, a perspective others would look at it. It helped me fix those small details, that make the difference.

Just yesterday I was looking for a new background for my desktop. I was googling around, searching for a nice pic, until I remembered, I have quite a collection of nice photographs - why not use my own? So I went looking for a photo of mine that I’d like to constantly look at. I decided on this one. Before, I didn’t really consider this photo as anything special (good, but not all that), but using it as a background, I’ve realized how much I really like it.

So I guess this is just the best way to judge your work - just look at it. Don’t open it in photoshop to look for any errors. It will only make you feel bad about how many there are.

Some people may also prefer printing their art and hanging it on the wall. I do this with some vector drawings, since they’re just too plain for a decent background. As long as you look at the work in a relaxed kind of way, you’ll see how it really is. If you tear it off your wall or change the desktop background in a few hours… it’s probably bad. Back to the drawing board then.