Image Post: Ana gets the Dragon Treatment

The last post was some stuff I did to Ana's avatar a couple days ago.  This was notable for two things, one is that when I did it I found the avatar to be rather larger than I expected it to be.  More than twice as big in fact.  The other is that none of it involved what she was talking about wrt to loving one of the dragons.

Assuming I'm right about which one she meant by "the first one you posted" she was talking about this thing:

And the process to get there was rather different from what I did in the last post.  I'll describe it below.

For those who are impatient,I start with this: (shown actual size) and the end result is this:

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Now, as it turns out, Ana's avatar as it appears here is as tiny as I thought it was:

Which brings up the question, what can one do with it?  It's kind of small.  The work on the dragon above came from the work on Mona Lisa which in turn flowed from an attempt to find a quick easy way to make fake brush strokes for the Sparklegul.

The brush stroke thing still needs some serious modification before it can be called anything but a failure, but when working with the Mona Lisa I adapted the technique to create colorful not at all realistic looking scaling, and that's what eventually made it's way into the dragon.

As for why someone would want colorful not at all realistic looking scaling, these are the alternatives gimp offers: (I encourage you to view them at full size to see the full awful)

This, is what Inkscape provides:

As noted elsewhere, that can be scaled to any size.  It will never pixelate.  Well, this one will because it's been exported to a non-vector image, but in general an inkscape image can be scaled to any size.  I use it to provide lines.

To the dragon process, and the Mona Lisa process before it, is, to the best of my recollection, this:

1 White Balance:

2 Scale up

3 Take the inkscape export of the same size, Laplace, desaturate, then Laplace until you've covered the image in lines.  Then I used the lines for a depth merge between two versions of the original one darker, one lighter.  I'm sure that there's a better way, perhaps 87 better ways.  I even have some thoughts one what some of those ways may be.

Repeat 2 (Scale up)

Repeat 3 (Lines)

Repeat 2 (Scale up)

Repeat 3 (Lines)

Sharpen

And in the end we get a result that doesn't look all that good, but at least feels somewhat artistic and given that we started from this:

And our best alternatives were this and this:

I actually feel pretty good about my scaling technique.