Breathing new life into old work: how I used AI to upscale and reimagine a 15-year-old illustration

The web is flooded with articles and posts about how creatives are using AI as a tool to build entirely new concepts from scratch. While that's exciting, I wanted to share my own perspective and experience on how AI tools can step into our daily production workflows, save time, and help us re-purpose our own creative archives.

Here is a look at how I used Adobe Firefly to transform an old, low-resolution illustration into a fresh, high-res event poster.

Stage 1: Digging into the archive (The low-res starting point)

It started with a piece I created over 15 years ago. I still love the original concept, but like many older digital files, it only existed as a flattened, low-resolution asset completely unsuited for modern print or large-scale digital displays.

I decided to see how AI could improve the quality of the pixelated, low-res illustration.

The original 15-year-old illustration - a flattened, low-resolution file with pixelation unsuited for modern print layouts.

Stage 2: Upscaling and generating the concept

I brought the low-res file into Adobe Firefly to act as my structural foundation. Rather than just upscaling the pixels, I wanted to give the artwork a brand-new purpose.

I provided Firefly with the image structure and used a targeted prompt to elevate the details, scale it to a crisp, high-resolution finish, and integrate it into a brand-new context: a poster for a fictional event. Firefly gave a pretty nice option for the first result. It captured the composition of my original work perfectly, adding the crisp depth and sharpness needed for a modern poster layout.

The first result generated by Adobe Firefly, instantly adding the crisp depth, sharp vector-like lines, and text layout needed for an event poster.

Stage 3: Exploring creative variations

One of the most useful aspects of incorporating AI into a production workflow isn't just getting a single final result - it’s the speed of exploration.

At this stage, I asked the tool to generate multiple design variations and layout options. By tweaking the style strengths and composition settings, I could instantly see how the artwork adapted to different colour spaces, typographic placements, and overall layouts.

Exploring creative variations: Firefly rapidly generated alternative style directions, from vintage imprints to cosmic neon aesthetics.

Stage 4: Refining the best direction

Even with great variations, the creative process is rarely linear. Looking at the different styles made me appreciate the strength of my very first iteration. Instead of moving forward with the completely new styles, I decided to loop back to that initial successful image from Stage 2. I used it as the core reference and asked Firefly to generate a fresh batch of alternative compositions based strictly on that specific look. This step is where the tool shines - helping you focus on a favourite direction and explore layout alternatives while keeping the same visual identity. Of course, this is a process and not the final result; there is still traditional editing work to do after this stage to get everything perfect.

Refining the final layout: looping back to the first result to generate a fresh batch of composition and framing alternatives while keeping the exact same visual identity.

The takeaway

Using AI doesn't mean losing your creative voice; it means giving your existing voice more leverage. By using Adobe Firefly as a production collaborator, I was able to bridge a 15-year gap in file quality in a fraction of the time it would take to manually redraw it. It turned an archived memory into an active, functional asset.