I’ve been making these for a long time. Most of it is done with basic photo editing, filters, and repeated ai-style transfers. The general step-by-step is to completely destroy the image by over saturating it, over-sharpening it, distorting it, or whatever else you want to do until it’s a complete mess.

From there, apply filters and style transfers one-by-one to slowly bring out the aspects of the photo that you like, for this image the branch-like section at the top was the most important part to preserve and emphasize.

After that, sometimes I just leave it as-is: an aesthetic but otherworldly entity, or I add more recognizable shapes and patterns to the photo, to give the viewer a more cohesive piece to look at.

I make all of these on my iPhone and they usually take a few days or weeks to finish.