Hard gritty rainbows

I think a large part of the fascination with these grainy inside fractals is how difficult I find them. The Mandelbrot set, by now, is quite familiar: I've explored it very thoroughly, and learned a lot about how its patterns fit into each other. I know it well enough that I can fairly reliably navigate to any kind of pattern I decide to look for. With coloring methods, too, many of them have become familiar enough to be very precisely controlled, which is what allows me to make those literal, illustrative images that I still can't decide whether I like or not.

But these Nova insides are unknown territory, strange and foggy, and (at least so far) nearly impossible to get a grip on. Patterns stack up on top of each other, sliding in and out of focus as the maxiter changes. It's clear that they're following some kind of deeply-structured logic, but so far I haven't been able to understand it well enough to predict what it might do in any given spot.

So working with them is hard. And it turns out that I've been somehow craving something hard, something frustrating, something impossible to understand quickly. Maybe it's because I'm free of school. School was horrible in a whole bunch of ways, but it did at least give me a fair amount of hard stuff to bash at.

I have conversations with the Professor sometimes, usually around exam time, when his students are complaining bitterly that things are too hard. And I sympathize, except that when I'm only doing easy things, it's as though I can feel my brain cells shriveling up. Doing something hard helps keep me in shape, so that I don't turn into a sad dull boring person, full of complaints about how hard everything is.

With these two images, I'm trying to see if some of my comfortable, familiar techniques (like the three-layer spectra) can be used on any of these infuriating sandy fractals.

Dragon & Phoenix Soup


Chain Reaction

Flame on

Following the example of a couple of people on the UF mailing list, I wanted to try using an Apophysis-generated flame as an imported image. Flames, being of course fractal, tuck themselves rather neatly into the overall composition, and function more or less as texture. It seems like a good way to add a certain depth and complexity of color without piling up an unwieldy number of layers or adding a lot of slow-rendering distortion algorithms to the basic trap.

Gosh, this means I'm going to have to open up Apophysis again, and try to remember which bits I'd worked out how to use, and make some stuff to use as components. That would solve one of my ongoing difficulties with flame fractals, actually, which is that I'm never able to decide how they should be cropped, or how much of the edges should be visible. As a finished image, a flame often looks a little isolated and weird when the entire form is surrounded by an area of solid color. But zooming them is problematic, and I'm always sad to lose the overall shape of the thing; they have a kind of satisfying completeness when you can see how all the parts fit together into a coherent entity. As a plugged-in image trap, that wholeness would be an advantage.

untitled [flame trap test]


The flame I used in this one was almost perfectly circular, so it's not actually all that useful a test. But I didn't have one with a more irregular shape handy, because all my existing renders are too carefully cropped and zoomed. That'll teach me to try and frame things artistically.

A light bulb

Today I tried using the image import feature, for the first time since my couple of brief experiments when UF5 first came out. I'm still substantially intimidated by it, mainly because it adds such a large new dimension of possibilities to an already overwhelming number of choices. How in the world can I ever manage to decide what pictures I need infinitely many of?

I've gotten used to the idea of fractals being, for the most part, purely abstract. They don't necessarily need to mean anything, they just need to be arranged in pleasing compositions of color and shape. The thing about importing images is that it instantly changes the picture from abstract and non-threatening to concrete, specific, nailed-down and potentially fraught with meaning. Suddenly I have to think about concept, which I am exceedingly wary of. It's the sort of thing required by art school, and beloved of the kinds of artists I really dislike. I don't want my stuff to turn into Political!Art! all full of sleek graphical representations of talking-heads-of-state or Hitler's brain on drugs or what have you.

Except that I've also spent a fair amount of time in the last several months making fractals that are definitely illustrations, and approach something like recognizable. Sometimes I even have a concept in mind, much as I might hate to admit it.

So I figured it was time to drag out some of my favorite recurring motifs, the ones I'm comfortable with, and put them into fractals to see what they do. I started with this light bulb.

A Light Bulb



A Julia set introduced some nice distortions, making the shape more globe-like. But it's still quite recognizable, and not terribly interesting except that it makes kind of a good dark/light pattern.

Julia Bulbs



I had another fractal window open, with a different picture I'd been working on, an Ikenaga Roots-Mandel. So I tried pasting the image trap into one of the layers, and ended up with something like a steam-powered carpet slipper.

Brass Slippers



This one seems cheerfully bizarre enough that I'd like to pursue it further, and maybe add some layers with more images: say, a tuba or something. It would be fun to see if I could make some really ridiculous fractal contraptions. Or, y'know, talking-heads-of-state.

Am I still here?

Carrying on regardless, and trying to remind myself that there are always possibilities. Even if some of those possibilities aren't quite what I was hoping for.

(The World is) Your Questionable Mollusc

Through the meat-grinder & onto the scrap-heap

Last night I dreamed about my first visit to Seattle. The weather was stunningly wonderful, all flawless blue skies and painfully brilliant sunlight and impossibly clear air. That was several years ago, now: probably the last time in my life I was ever purely, perfectly happy.

The weather was like that again today; it hurt my eyes to look at it, and hurt the rest of me to remember. I'm hitting a point of saturation and disgust, with fractals, with myself. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to keep doing this post-a-day for much longer.

untitled [to hell with pretty spirals]

Pretty flowers

Something suitable for late summer:

Queen Anne's Lace

Why is this still occupying my mind

Well, I will try not to think too much about the complaints of others. If nothing else, it maybe counts as a slight change from the endless

Fractal Universe Calendar Kvetching



. . .

Right. Time to go do something else for a while.

(Mostly) completely different

And now for something...

Softer. Dreamier. Pearly, swirly, bubbly, girly.

I really don't know what to say about this version, except that if I were to wash the sticky eye-candy out of my brain with soap, this is what the suds would probably look like.



This NaArMaMo thing is hard. Soon, though, I'm going to be done with my variations on this particular spiral, and drag some Chebyshev formulas out of the vaults or something.

That authentic antique patina

Moving on from complete psychedelia, I will try some experiments to see how close I can get to "tasteful." This is a highly subjective term, of course. Full-spectrum rainbow colors are not generally put into the category, in my experience, so the first thing I'll try is skewing the color palette substantially. While I'm at it, I'll mess with the layers a bit, just to further muddy things up.



Well, now the colors are closer to ones you might find in certain kinds of painting: fox-hunters riding out onto ye olde estates, a still-life with fruit and cheese, or some rustic scene by Winslow Homer. But it's still disconcertingly metallic, and it's still overwhelmingly fractal. I think you'd have to hang it in a really dark corner of the drawing-room, where the door casts a shadow, so the visiting Duchess won't notice it, and faint from the shock.

I do think, though, that it would hold its own against an elaborate gilded picture-frame quite nicely.

A moderate resemblance to scarab beetles

Today I have once again taken my hapless spiral and covered it with intense colors. This time there's more going on: each repeated shape is many colors, with changes of hue and with tertiary tints and shades to provide the illusion of depth. I've decided to make all the iterations visible, instead of having them overlap and block each other, so the self-similarity is very pronounced.

The result is, if anything, even more psychedelic than yesterday's images. It still has those computerish colors, in gradients that include pretty much the full spectrum. The smaller copies of the spiral structure reflect the larger image, while being made of still smaller copies of themselves: it doesn't take too much thinking before you get to infinity, and then an infinity of infinities. It's really complicated, in all the ways that attracted me to fractals in the first place, however many years ago.

This, then, is a version of psychedelia I quite enjoy. It's all about math and pattern and growth, and the color is complex enough to be interesting instead of flat.



Whatever its good points, though, it's certainly garish. It's not bad on-screen, but rendered large, and printed out, it would be awfully assertive.

De re psychedelia

In the spirit of NaArMaMo, I'm going to try to post something every day during August. In that same spirit, there are no guarantees that any of it will be any good. My plan is to start with some discussion about psychedelic art, which I've had rattling around in my head ever since the local art critic came to talk to our senior class about the BFA show, and decided that was what category my stuff belonged in, because it included some fractals. A reasonable assumption, given the minuscule amount of evidence available to her, but definitely not how I think of myself. Psychedelia is strongly associated with certain kinds of counter-culture politics and philosophy, which I mostly don't find interesting, even though I sometimes enjoy the aesthetic effect.

There is no question that fractal forms are well suited to psychedelic imagery. Repeating geometric patterns are well-known features of the poster art of the '60s, and spirals are always a recurring motif. Computer monitors, with their pure RBG emitted light, are a perfect medium for anything that uses brilliant saturated colors. It's ridiculously easy to make bright groovy pictures with a fractal generator.

A quick bit of explanation about color theory: In the usual systems, there are three primary colors. Subtractive mixing, as with paint, ink, or other pigments or dyes, has magenta, cyan, and yellow as its primaries. As colors are combined, wavelengths of light are absorbed by each of them, and subtracted from the mix. Less light is reflected, the combined colors get darker, and if all three primaries are mixed in the correct proportions, the result approaches black. With additive mixing, as on a computer monitor or other illuminated screen, the primaries are red, green, and blue. When these colors of light are combined together, the wavelengths are added to each other: more light, and the color gets brighter and approaches white.

Different sources vary in their use of the words "secondary" and "tertiary" to describe colors. According to some systems, the secondary colors are defined as only the ones which combine two primaries in equal proportion—those which fall exactly half-way between the primaries on a color wheel. Therefore there are only three secondary colors, and the tertiary colors are all the rest of the hues around the circumference of the color wheel, with maximum saturation. Colors with added white or black are called tints or shades.

The other way to define secondary and tertiary is that secondary colors combine two primaries, while tertiaries combine all three. The resulting color depends on the proportion of each primary, and can range from almost complete saturation to quite neutral. I find this second system more useful, mainly because it seems more descriptive of how the color-mixing process works. It means that when I'm adjusting the coloring of a fractal, and maybe it seems too bright and harsh, I know that I can desaturate it to take the edge off a little. And desaturating a color can be as simple as adding more of whichever primary there's the least of.

Anyway, the point of all this digression is that if I'm talking about a secondary color, it means one that's composed of only two primaries and is completely saturated, and not just one of the three in-between hues.

So, given all this color stuff, I'm going to find a nice eye-sucking spiral and blow its mind. Here's a good one, from the Julia set with seed (-0.732261, 0.225087).



There's something about this that reminds me of certain kinds of neo-baroque wallpaper. A bit stuffy, perhaps. But not to worry! Just eat/drink/sniff/snort/dissolve-under-the-tongue/otherwise ingest this. Zowie.



Ouch. My eyeballs feel funny. Can we mellow it out a little?



Hm. Well, maybe it has a little bit of a Peter Max vibe. "It looks like kindergarten," says my (relatively sober) outside observer. And that's a reasonable observation, because what's going on here is that the colors are very simple and unsophisticated. Absolutely pure primaries and secondaries are the quickest way to make something look like a blacklight poster. But it's a pretty cheap trick, and lacks any subtlety. I plan to remedy that tomorrow, after the walls stop pulsing and oozing like that.

Ok, you're a cab

Some months ago on the Ultra Fractal mailing list, Kerry Mitchell posted a lovely example of phyllotaxis patterns around a minibrot. I've had the idea for this image rattling around my head ever since.

Phyllo Taxis



Or should that be "File o' Taxis"?

Cue the Sousa march

Yeah, I have too much time on my hands these days. This is really not much of an effort; the lighting on the hardware is all wrong, but I need to stop tweaking it and go do something more productive.

A Political Fractal



By way of technical notes, I will merely say that it's all about the Orbit Traps.

Reasons to stay inside

My semester is finally over (hooray!) and so I have a little time to think about fractals again. I expect it will take me a while to get back up to speed again.

This weekend we're getting a whole bunch of unusually wintery weather, so I dug up a very old image that I've always liked, but that somehow never made it as far as any of my various gallery pages.

Snowbound



When I first made this one, in early 2001, I remember being annoyed by how slowly it rendered. That was at least two processors ago, and now it takes less than a minute for a decent screen preview, and about twelve minutes for a 1600x1200 disk render, which seems much better.

None for you

I'm in the middle of moving into a new apartment right now, and today I took a break and looked at some various fractals online, by way of a distraction. A bit of orderly chaos, as a change from the disorderly chaos of boxes around me.

I should have realized, though, that it would only make me all frustrated, because of course looking at fractals makes me want to go exploring, and make pictures of my own, but the computer with all the fractal-rendering programs isn't available right now, and isn't going to be available for another several days at least. Arrgh.

Instead, I've dug through the folders on my (faithful, old, slow) laptop, and found this one, which seemed somewhat appropriate.

Temptation



It's related to several of the ones I've posted in the last weeks. Those spirals are down there, all right, curling slowly in the smoky beam of the spotlight. But I can't have them right now. Grr.

These primitive tools

This one is somewhat related to the previous couple, but ended up brighter. I could probably have given it a nice cheerful, sunny title, but I'm still in Intrepid Explorer mode, so it's called

Bronze Axes



(There are two axes, the real axis and the imaginary axis. Ha ha. I'm an idiot.)

Hooray for Captain Spaulding

Just when I think I'm completely jaded and done with fractals, things come along and give me another nudge. I was looking at the ever-reliable Fractal Complaints Department, and although there's never actually anything new there, it did remind me that it's been a while since I made any brightly-colored, excessively-layered spirals. So tonight I spent a little time exploring.

Into the Jungle



While wandering through these shadowy (though remarkably well-charted) regions, I found myself surrounded on all sides by the usual sorts of creatures: things with spines and scales and multicolored warts and, of course, lots of spirals.

Pathological Monsters



These two are both Mandelbrot zooms, with similar locations and many of the same coloring algorithms applied. I have a few others saved; maybe at some point I'll post more and call it a series.

More input

I'm all uninspired and blah lately. I think what I probably need is something new, something outside my usual tiny orbit of school and home and the occasional grocery run. I will have to think about what kinds of sensory information would be interesting or useful.

Ear, Nose & Throat



A visit to the conservatory, to see if some greenery might be available at this grey time of year? Some new music to listen to? Chocolate?

Golden rectangles, in blue

Not exactly fractal, but I've been working on a series of etchings that's definitely mathematical. Seven square plates, sized by Fibonacci numbers, etched with lines tangent to a curve. Printed all together, they make a rectangle 13" x 21", and the effect can change depending on how they're oriented.

untitled (blue prints I & II)



I also quite liked the initial proof I did of the plates before they'd had anything etched onto them at all. It made a print of squares embossed into the surface of the paper. Very minimalist.

Hung out to dry

I did a dozen prints today, in a couple of different colors. I had planned to carve the wood block more at this stage, only now I think I want to do a few more color variations before I take anything away. It's always a bit of a dilemma; on the one hand, I'm impatient to hurry up and get to the next stage so I can see what these things are going to look like when they're done, but on the other hand, once you've cut, you can't go back. So it's good to do lots of copies before continuing.

I'd also like to try getting some different colors of paper, for even more color complications.