How to recreate this Arctic Monkeys wallpaper?

Question

How could this be recreated in a method that would work with other pictures as well, using Gimp?

Thanks Cai, that's what I'm doing (or was going to do). I was just hoping there was some cool GIMP trick that would be able to do this. — Chillin' Chipmunk, Jul 2, 2016 at 6:57
It wouldn't be possible in GIMP but I know how to do it in Adobe Illustrator. Seeing that it's vector art, that's most likely what was used. Illustrator has an Image Trace feature, then you'd go to Simplify => Straight lines to remove the curves — Fredrick Brennan, Jul 2, 2016 at 13:34
You can use Inkscape to trace the image and use the result as starting point. Perhaps before the tracing operation you can perform with the Gimp a little preprocessing using the threshold or the posterization tool. — Paolo Gibellini, Jul 4, 2016 at 11:05

Andrew Robinson · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-04 17:46:39Z

Get and open up Inkscape (completely free, open source vector editor).
Import your reference image into Inkscape (File > Import)
Start blocking in the polygons and triangles around the faces of the people in the image. If you look closely at the wallpaper, the most basic shapes (large, non-detailed shapes) are at least 3 sides (duh). I would block them in in triangles and polygons with no more than four sides. Just add a few shapes around the hair, where the hair would change color, and the clothes
Now block out the finer details (strands of hair, face contours, etc) using the same method as with the larger shapes you previously made in step 3.
For the final step, use the fill property of your shapes to color the polygons in.

If you follow along with these steps, you should get a result similar to that wallpaper of yours.

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