Keep your old illustrations. It could come in handy.

 Hi! Hi!  Yes, it's been a very, very busy month.  On top of full-time work, pet portrait commissions I also signed up with a business coach and art licencing agency.  It's been quite full-on since then.  I'm constantly producing patterns and work and I am so grateful that I spent years just drawing that I have plenty of older work that I can use and re-vamp.  Here are a couple of samples where I revised my old work from the House of Birds joint exhibition I had in 2014.

The original Red Robin illustration done with copics:

And a cropped version of the revised illustration for a Greeting card submission proposal.

I think this Spotted Pardalote sold too but am not 100% sure.

And here' a cropped version of the revised illustration. The second pardalote was done with a combination of editing the scan and adding in new details.  

It was really handy having a lot of work partially done that I just had to edit since I needed to come up with 14-15 new pieces in 5 days plus present it to a standard and I had a pet portrait commission to do to at that time as well.  After all this, I can safely say that my Photoshop skills have definitely improved.  I am now currently preparing more surface pattern work for an upcoming show through the agency.  I have so far come up with 12 new designs to show and 8 of those uses an old illustration as it's base.  The oldest so far being 2013 work.  

 My base is normally a hand draw one and scanned into Photoshop and coloured there more often than not.  Though a good chunk of the illustrations I used were already coloured with copics, so I had to match and clean up in Photoshop.  I count 2 illustrations where I lost the originals, it annoys the hell out of me but what can you do? I got careless.

For hand drawn artists, scan as high as possible and keep more than one digital back up.  For digital artists, it's definitely all about the back up.  More than 1 drive, that's for sure.  I still have to organize my files, myself.

Anyway, keep your old illustrations.  Never know when you need to come up with a huge amount of work in a very short space of time.  Nothing is ever really a waste.