Hello everyone, hope you've had a good entry into the new year !

With some help from my sister, I'v finally been able to create a work of art with a high enough resolution (2000 X 2000px) and quality to be accepted on Known Origins !

20 editions @ 0.13 Eth each, Lion's Guardian is my first truly High Resolution work, exclusively available over on Known Origin !

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I started out with my normal "pipeline" :

Weavesilk piece -> Deep Style Processing -> GIMP edits

Here's the intermediary results:

Weavesilk

Deep Style

At just 1000 X 1000 px before I even cut it down to size in the next step, this piece is a Raster (AKA. pixel-composed) image of relatively medium quality.

GIMP

After mirroring and cutting down, the piece is only 500X500 px at most, pretty small.

I quite liked it, but it needed to get a quality and size boost.

Known Origin requested a 2000 X 2000 high resolution piece, after all.

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Once the preliminary steps were done, and I had a base I could work with, the Big Question pointed it's ugly head.

How can I convert my Raster (composed of small colored pixels, which don't exactly scale well) to a proper high resolution piece ?

After all, here's what it looks like if I zoom in too much on the original piece:

As you can see, this is at 400X, which, as 500 x 500 px, is about as much as I'd need to magnify the image to get the 2000 X 2000 px piece I want.

The pixels are becoming clear, and the lack of quality is visible, so it'd never be accepted on Known Origin like this !!

After consulting with my sister, who has been studying Art with a french Beaux-Arts school for some years now ( I encourage everyone to check out her amazing art ! I've still got two different works from her on my SuperRare too ! 1 2), we came to the conclusion that Vectorization was what I was looking for.

Given I'm still using Deep Dream Generator's website, which limits how high resolution I can create the initial images in , my sister counseled me to use Adobe Illustrator's free trial to test the vectorization of my works.

Vectorization is a funny thing.

You already know about vector images, composed not of individual pixels but of lines that can be resized to give the exact same quality image no matter which size it is made to be !

Here's an example:

Source: Vector tutorial on vectr.com

So, a black and white image is one thing, but how do you convert a colorful image like mine to a Vector ?

Mini Guide: Transforming a Raster (pixel) image to a Vector image using Adobe Illustrator CC 2019

First, we load the selected image into Illustrator

Then we find the Image Trace option in the Window menu:

We can then select one of the presets, I like how High-quality Photo makes the image look; though there are options for greyscale; black and white and low quality too:

And here's how that looks when viewing it from far away

Zoomed in slightly

and extremely zoomed in, where we can see that there are no longer any pixels, just colored areas.

I then like to use the Export for... --> for screens option in the File menu , using the image as the main asset and exporting to 1X, 2X and 4X PNG sizes in one go.

The image I used above as an example is actually one of my newest works, that I'm about to publish on SuperRare after I write this article.

It uses a new GIMP function, Emboss, which I haven't used before, and I made a rather striking GIF using it.

I love experimenting with new things !

Looking at it has a slightly disturbing/hypnotizing effect, I find...

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As always, my works and all images in this article, except where otherwise specified, are released under CC-BY-NC 4.0