Technical interlude

I accidentally made a useful discovery about this parametric-curves coloring method I've been working on. It's nearly done, and I've been working on writing a help file, but of course mostly I just spend time playing with it.

Originally, it made dotted shapes, like these.



Then just recently, I had some help, and got it to do joined lines, as well.



It turns out, if you type the wrong thing in certain parameters, it can also do things like this.



Click on the pictures for bigger versions, especially the last batch—they look really cool when you can see all the fine lines.

And then all these can be mapped onto fractals, exactly like any other orbit trap. Those last complicated ones become fairly slow to calculate, but no worse than some of the other coloring methods out there. I have a number of potential-images-in-progress using some of this stuff. They're fiddly to work with, because their geometry is extremely non-fractal, and so it's easy to end up with a kind of awful jarring mismatch of styles. But I think I'm starting to find ways of integrating them into compositions with reasonably good effect.