SurfaceModeller as an artist tool

From fmepedia

The idea is very simple - take a raster, and send it to SurfaceModeller via POINTS port. Take output from CONTOURS port, voilà - here is your art picture. Making it even more artisitic requires a few more steps. Each contour line has an elevation attribute. Add ExpressionEvaluator, divide elevation by 255.0 (if you deal with RGB24 raster), take the _result attribute and build an fme_color attribute with concatenator (as "_result, _result, _result"). You will get nice gray scale contours.

WARNING: If you run Dmitri's workspace then be aware that it may take some time to complete on larger raster datasets. I ran it on a 3mb 7168x1465 image and it took 44 minutes - the output is pretty interesting though!

Some pictures will allow building polygons. In this case polygons have to be sorted by their area size (AreaCalculator and Sorter).

Check closer the details - it's not a raster anymore (well, it wasn't a raster in my Universal Viewer):

Note that you hardly can save on storage when you change the representation from raster to vector. If you save the output of the attached workspace to FFS, it will be above 8 megs. Compare it to 300 kb of the original image.