After mastering photorealistic AI art, Dutch artist Dimitry van den Berg deliberately pivoted to illusory pixelations
Dimitry van den Berg has mastered the art of photorealistic AI imagery. His portraits look convincingly real despite an unsettling curiosity that draws you in.
Dimitry's other artwork, however, appears entirely different. At a distance, you see a woman in a shower — intimate, human, real. Step closer, and the image dissolves into scattered pixels and noise. Step back and she reappears, conjured by your own mind filling in the gaps.
"Your imagination is filling it in," says Dimitry. "I want to convey that it's also about relationships, how we relate to each other and how we relate to the technology that's now coming."
Behind the illusion of his scattered pixel art is a highly methodical process. Dimitry’s workflow centers on a technique he calls "double pixelation," a layering process that creates images with shifting clarity.
The foundation starts with custom style training in Recraft. Dimitry uploads reference material called Perlin noise patterns. These are essentially controlled randomness that builds natural-looking patterns by layering random details from large to small (for example, mountain ranges in Minecraft).
Dimitry also creates a second style using pixelated images processed through his custom tool at studiodimitry.com. Once he has his base image, which is already stylized with his trained noise aesthetic, he runs it through his pixelation tool again. This second pass adds another layer of digital disruption on top of the first.
"What I like about Recraft is stylization and composition: where people are located, how they relate to each other. And it's very good at following prompts."
Recraft's custom styles feature makes this process ultra efficient and the styles are ready almost instantly. The final step involves merging these two versions: the original Recraft generation and its re-pixelated counterpart.
This layering creates the optical illusion effect he's known for: images that appear abstract up close but resolve into recognizable forms when viewed from a distance.
"I combine them and overlap them, and then you get kind of really strange noisy things. But if you look from afar, you can still see what it is."
Dimitry's success with photorealism became precisely what led him to question it. The flood of technically perfect AI imagery pushed him into what he calls an "art crisis." Having proven he could create convincing illusions, he became more interested in exposing them.
"I got myself a bit confused about AI," he admits. "There's such an abundance of AI art in the world, and they all kind of strive for the photorealistic thing. I thought, I have to move away from photorealism for a while. I have to show people that an image is just pixels. An image is just noise and your imagination is filling it in."
To understand Dimitry's artistic evolution, consider "White Knight," one of his photorealistic pieces.
The process is mastery of a method: developing story and theme; detailed prompting covering subjects, clothing, objects, scene placement, mood, and action; initial generation in Recraft using a custom style; refinements with Nano Banana and Photoshop; color grading; double upscaling with Magnific.ai; and final additional retouching.
This technical precision represents years of practice shaped by a background in 3D animation. Back then, every frame required meticulous technical work.
"When you work in 3D, it's a very technical approach," he says. "You have to put in the camera specs, the composition, the things you want to convey. AI had some potential to do the same thing."
Once Dimitry discovered Disco Diffusion, an early but crude AI art tool, he immediately recognized it as "the future of art making." The AI transformed his productivity. For creating a single image that once required complex 3D workflows, Dimitry can now capture inspiration almost instantly.
"If something pops up in my head, I can recreate that immediately. I can prompt it in and try to recreate the image that I have in my head. I think I get 90% there."
Dimitry's experiments with pixelation and noise make it obvious that he's not just generating AI art “out of the box” or accepting it at face value. Instead, he bends the AI to meet his vision, layering tools in unprecedented ways.
"I always try to circumvent this bias the tools create — the way they can shape your imagination once you know their limits. So I push to make new styles and do strange things with them," he says.
Dimitry’s art scuttles the boundaries between digital and physical, allowing us to reflect on perception, identity, and what it means to be human when machines are getting much better at simulating us.
In essence, Dimitry is using artificial intelligence to question the nature of intelligence itself.
"I use the tool, but does the tool use me? Because my imagination, the things I come up with, is kind of biased towards the tools that I'm using."
Dimitry’s advice to fellow creatives? Use AI as a tool to support your workflow and artistic integrity. But don’t let it dictate your imagination.
Find Dimitry at dimitryvandenberg.com and on Instagram.
