I spent 20 hours on a piece in Procreate and killed it in 5 minutes with a filter, still don't know if I made the right call

Eva Adams · 2026-09-18T07:30:03.679168+00:00

Honestly I worked on this forest spirit illustration for 20 hours, every leaf and glow effect done by hand at 2am in my apartment in Denver. Then I ran it through a cheap watercolor filter and it looked way better in 30 seconds. Part of me says the filter is cheating and cheapens all that effort, but the other part says the final image is what matters and it got 300 more likes than any of my clean stuff. Has anyone else thrown a whole piece away for a preset and felt weird about it after?

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I spent 20 hours on a piece in Procreate and killed it in 5 minutes with a filter, still don't know if I made the right call | Digital Art Showcase - Discusd