Have you ever finished something you created and genuinely thought, “Okay, I did that”? You like it; you are happy with how it turned out, and you might even feel a little proud of yourself. Then, after seeing it a few more times, something changes. You start noticing things you hadn‘t noticed before. The part you loved suddenly looks off. You question the choice you were so sure about, and eventually you are wondering how you ever thought the whole thing was good.
It is a strange experience, but it is not necessarily a sign that your work has suddenly become worse. A big part of it comes down to familiarity. Our brains respond differently to things when they are new compared with when we have seen them repeatedly. When you first create something, you are experiencing the finished result after a long process of making decisions. Once you have looked at it over and over again, you are no longer simply seeing the work. You are seeing every decision behind it.
That can happen to almost any creative work. A writer can finish a piece and feel good about the words, then reread it so many times that even a perfectly normal sentence starts sounding strange. A photographer can love a photograph until they have edited it, reviewed it, and stared at it for hours. A musician can be excited about a track until they have heard the same section enough times to start wondering why they ever liked it. The same thing happens with illustrations, videos, concepts, and pretty much anything else that requires you to spend a lot of time looking at your own creation.
There is something called the mere-exposure effect, which describes how repeated exposure to something can influence how much we like it. Familiarity can make things feel more comfortable and appealing, but creative work has an interesting complication: you can become too familiar with your own work. At that point, you are not necessarily judging it based on what another person would see. You are judging it against all the versions that existed in your head before you settled on the final one.
That may be why creatives can sometimes be much harsher on their own work than everyone else is. You know what you intended it to be. You know the version that almost worked. You remember the idea you started with and every change you made along the way. Someone else has no information. They are simply seeing what is in front of them.
And maybe that is one of the less obvious parts of creating things. You are not only making something; you are also constantly developing a relationship with it. At first, there is excitement because it is new. Then comes familiarity, then scrutiny, and sometimes a point where you simply cannot tell whether you still dislike the work or you have just looked at it too much.
So the next time something you created suddenly looks terrible to you, it might not be because you have lost your touch. You might just be very, very familiar with it.