found this on a science fiction blog and its by a DA guy called Lexis Barant
http://lexis-barant.deviantart.com/

any ideas how to make the dissolving pixels in GIMP ?

Wondering if this may be of help.



Also, thinking layer mask and Filters > Render > Patterns > Checkerboard > Psychobilly. This would have to be played with more but it's a possibility.

i think most of the Lexis picture is a grid on top of everything with various layermasks applied

what im wondering is how the flying pixels where achieved
you could do it all by hand, but maybe a pattern is an alternative

This is an effect based on dithering, a common practice among pixel artists, there are many patterns fun to try, here are some, rendered with contrasting colors to emphasize the effect (because usually dithering is used to smooth color transitions which is not the case here in this blade runner fan image):

Each of these patterns is made using only 3 solid hues, the purpose is to trick the eye, making you believe that there are more colors in play:

anarkhya, where in the Bladerunner picture do we see this dithering effect ?

you can see it applied right side of the 'e', left side of the 'R', and also in the background to make it fade to black, which is not truly fading but more dissolving a shape as you put it earlier.

But, again, this blade runner image doesn't want to be smoothed by the dithering, instead, it circumvents the traditional purpose of dithering in order to make it a "shape effect".

ah okay, now i get it

how do you achive this effect - is it a filter ?

If you would do this the pixel art way, you would have to put those big pixels at first manually in order to create the seamless pattern you want then automatically repeat this pattern along the image. But in our case it is not even a strictly repeated pattern, it just respects the dissolving concept which is to make a shape be more and more fragmented, if you "read" the picture vertically you'll notice how this dissolving is made, the more you climb, the more you fragment.

There may be a filter for this but as it is not the way I use dithering (dithering is of little use within the digital truecolor art where zillions colors live ) I know nothing more about..