AI Upscaling Is My Lord and Savior

I soured on fully-AI-generated art pretty quickly, but being able to upscale tiny-ass art is a life saver. This was my journey.

I was looking for art for a Psychic-type trainer, and the one I had in mind was this guy from Gen IV:

I didn't want to use the pixel-art sprite in the VN for obvious reasons, so I was hoping I could find some concept art or something on Bulbapedia or elsewhere on the internet. I didn't want a picture of the 3D model from the more recent games, I basically wanted Ken Sugimori's original drawn version. You can find art of NPC trainers all over the place and I was already using Sugimori's art for Jasmine, Cynthia, etc. I figured this would be easy to find, so I used a shitty-looking placeholder images while writing the VN and decided to go looking for real art later.

Fast forward four months...

By this point I have the art I need for pretty much every NPC, major and minor, except for this one. The Gen IV Psychic trainer proves to be elusive, and I'm beginning to think official art just does not exist anywhere on the internet. I did find a really good fan drawing of the female gen IV Psychic trainer on DeviantArt, but even if I'm okay with stealing a stranger's drawing, it's too late to change this character's gender and he really works better as a boy than a girl. For whatever reason there is just no official art for Pokemon Psychics that are more than a couple hundred pixels tall. The best I've been able to find is this guy:

...but to be used in the VN, this image needs to be waaaay bigger. My NPC sprites default to 1000 pixels tall, and if I try to scale this guy up I just get grainy garbage.

Yuck. This is unusable. I considered just tracing this with a vector tool, which basically means I'm redrawing the sprite from scratch with the original as a helpful guide, but that's a lot of work for someone like me who can't draw, and the shading never looks as good as the original. I pretty much gave up and started making my own sprite by editing together pieces of official art that are large enough to be usable. Basically I was going to take a Black Belt or something and change his robe to be purple, swap in a head from a different trainer, something like that. It wasn't going to look good but it would have at least been usable...

Then I remembered it's the year 2022 and that I have a weird program on my computer that draws freaky nightmare waifus. It can also be used to just scale up existing images. I decide to give it a try, and...

SWEET JESUS

It's not perfect, there's a few spots where the lines turned a little squiggly - but I can edit that easily. This sprite still has kind of a weird pose for an NPC who spends most of his time standing around talking to you, but I do not give one single solitary fuck. I'll take what I can get, and when the machine overlords come to replace us, I'll be sure to thank them for this miracle before the kill us all.