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The above two images were taken from this tutorial which shows how to create architecture illustrations using the pixel stretching technique. I really like the overall effect of the images, I think it encapsulates the look of the modern metropolis with their massive bright lights and advertisments, especially in places such as Times Square. In the last crit I was critised for not editing my own images and unfortunately I don't live in a city with massive skyscrapers to take pictures of... so I made do with second best, Liberty Park!
Seriously though, I actually used Liberty Park because I thought the vibrant colours its walls are painted with would make really interesting image when a single row of pixels were stretched.
This is what I ended up with...


I'm quite happy with what I achieved. I've compared the original (left) to my image (right) which was created by stretching a single row of pixels from each section vertically, horizontally and even diagonally here and there. I did brighten the overall image to make it seem a little less dull.
I think its incredible how with such a tiny bit of information (just a single row of pixels multiplied however many times) can create something that still says almost as much as an image comprised of hundreds of thousands of pixels and colours. If you looked at the second image without it being compared to the original it would be instantly recognisable.


For this image I dramatically resized the original photo before doing the pixel stretching thus the lines are a lot thicker.

Notice anything diffirent from the image before? No? The diffirence is that this image has been livetraced in Illustrator. The beauty of pixel stretching is that you can livetrace it with only a tiny, hardly noticable diffirence, you can then blow the image up as large as you like without any loss to quality. Seeing as this is an exploration of 'what is a line' I thought I'd look at the defition of the word 'vector':

"a straight line segment whose length is magnitude and whose orientation in space is direction" - its a line, yay!

This is another image of liberty park which I recreated using pixel-stretching. It was taken from a lower angle highlighting the 3rd dimension of the building. This added a lot to the overall image after I stretched the pixels as I was able to darken certain faces of the building to show where the light was hitting it, it made it look a lot more like an object rathen than a two dimensional flat image consisting of parallel lines.

What was very challenging was changing the perspective of the windows to match the direction of the lines within the building as they got further away. It took me a while to find the right tools to use in photoshop and I had to do each one seperately... it took a while!