Marble Point

My NYE submission. The title originates from two things:

1. the overall appearance of planes of wafer-thin marble
2. the resemblance to Spurn Point (though I wonder whether Sperm Point wouldn't also be a good name ;))

I often consider what it would be like to live at the end of such a spit, taking the full brunt of elemental fury... :O I fancy also a resemblance to our own planet seen from space, with its thin layer of wispy atmosphere.

Light-bead curtain

A suitably cozy offering speaking of festive lights and hushed anticipation.

At the gates of the tomb

My entry for the December contest 'The end of all things'. The 'theme' of the contest is a recapitulation of lessons learned, fractal-wise, over the previous year. This is the final offering this year in a style which, as far as I know, I developed. It's also the last clue in the breadcrumb trail of how the style is achieved: the final piece of the puzzle is, appropriately, the final transform. I have used curl, boarders, polar and linear/spherical to achieve this series. Previous clues:

#1
#2
#3

The Law of Fives

A slightly older piece, a julian constructed on Discordian Principles, explicitly around the number five and its crucial cognates two and three (=23!).

A well-worn style, perhaps, but the deeper meaning warrants its inclusion ;)

Pieces of the puzzle

First piece inspired by Underworld lyrics. Split takes on boarders in the FX.

UNDERWORLD lyrics

Le Psychédélisme #2

No matter how many times you tear great cricular holes in the fabric, there's always another layer beneath!

Second in the mini-series.

#1 here.

Riven

Another tweak from this excellent Starter Flamepack.

Yuletide vision

"By this time, the snow was falling thickly and the air was brittle with cold. And as I approached collapse on that hillside, the view began to change: the falling snow assumed a definite pattern, arches, or fans, and then the whole appeared to break apart into slices, and the slices fragmented further until a kind of aperture, almost a mouth, formed and pulsed irregularly with a golden light. And that palpitating light communicated to me a message of universal joy and celebration - I understood that this was timed to coincide with our seasonal earthly festivals, the better to tap the positive vibe that briefly relieved internecine differences. So I returned to human habitation, aglow despite the cold, brimful of fresh meaning for our solstitial jubilations and feeling on the brink of a new-minted world."

Third of that style I'm slowly unveiling: add 10% oscilloscope on the elliptic transform to achieve the separations.

Le Psychédélisme #1

I cannot be entirely sure why I switched language for these. But it happened quite without premeditation and seems to fit, so there we are ;P First of a mini-series in this quadri-transformed lazysusan style. Lava-lamp colours scratchy-twist bubbly-clown faces into ephemeral existence :D

Fire of London

See the flashes of the great flames as they lick the ancient, dry timber of old London Town.

More fun with boarders.

Greengrass

Trimmed to perfection. A well-manicured and sculpted lawn for this Vegetation contest.

Second offering in this style - we've had disc-julian and rings2-julian, now meet elliptic-julian. More hints to come...

Forms

Contriving to look as though the layers have been trowelled on, this single Apophysis flame is first in the series of follow-ups to Expansion. The theme here is the complex interplay of orthogonal and circular forms. Surprisingly, this style utilises a 4-transform lazysusan base.

The Vault

Stash your goodies here with complete confidence... but remember to pay the asking price, a small favour demanded by the Vault Keeper. Otherwise, you may find yourself stashed here!

First submission in my newly-discovered style. Keep watch, and I shall name and explain the secrets in the fullness of time :D

Frozen cosmos

A conceptual vision of universal 'heat-death' - not, as I originally took it to mean, death by heat, rather the death of heat. Whole galaxies sit suspended for eternity in icy skeins, testament to an age that only was. Even entropy is spent.

The curious rime effect is obtained by use of a small filter radius (0.1) coupled with large master scale (100) and suitable gradient.

Flamenco

The colour, the passion, the flair...

Tip: use of colour symmetry

Whilst I must confess to a lack of mathematical rigour in my understanding of this function, what really matters for the artist is the effect. By default, the colour symmetry is 0 for all transforms. It may take any value between -1 and 1. -1 corresonds to "this transform's colour does not contribute". Increasing the value towards 1 has the effect of distributing the entire gradient from around the transform. For high-weight transforms, values closer to 1 give best results:



Here, transform #2 has weight = 30. For this gradient:



For others, experiment! One notable effect is causing colour to begin abruptly at a structural boundary and fade across the structure. Star mandala amulet is a good example of this.

Star mandala amulet

The forerunner of new style I discovered. Full view required to appreciate the bloom of verdigris upon the ancient metal.

Expansion

A somehow-Pythonesque tweak on eralex61's JoelFaberLand - a big thanks for sharing the parameters :D

Psycles

A tweak from this excellent Starter Flamepack using an alternative oily style.

Make of it what you will :D

Lost horizons

Barren, yet oddly beautiful. A sliver of space 'twixt the twin planes of land and sky. Sky lower than ever. Land a fragile tissue.

"Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."

- from 'He wishes for the cloths of heaven' by W.B. Yeats

Psychedelic abstract

I love the way that the boarders plugin picks up colour so had to try for an all-out psychedelic blast. This has the feel of an exploding toybox sketched with wax crayon.

Resonant swirls

A swirling caramel-coloured storm of chaos creating its own Temporary Autonomous Zone à la Great Red Spot, and sending supra-polyphonous ripples through the space-time continuum.

Into the pink

A great spiralling journey into a dream of soft pink, tinged with blue. Past, present and future coexist as juxtaposed fragments in the swirling narrative.

Pure juliascope/lazysusan.

Tip: micro-changes in the Editor

Some fractals are hypersensitive to the smallest changes. This is not the time to manually drag, rotate and resize the transforms, wonderful though these features are. Use the drop-down boxes on the Triangle tab in the Editor. And don't be content with the values given, type in your own: 1, or even less, for the rotation; the 0.01 preset in the move is probably adequate for micro-movements; and 101, or as low as 100.1, in the resize.



Probably the styles to which this applies most strongly are are the julian/juliascope-based types, in combination with any of disc, rings2 and more latterly lazysusan, escher, droste and loonie.

The maze

"And how will I get out?" asked Alice.

"Oh, you won't" replied Susan. "If you find your way out of one, you emerge into another. If you get out of that, you'll be in another. And so on... You're here for the long haul."

The darker side of Wonderland. The way out? Simultaneous acceptance and denial. I'm feeling remarkably cryptic today...

If you've not already guessed, more wonderment from the lazysusan plugin.

Mantis pray

Something I've had lying around for some time now and one of few rings2-julians that I'm happy with.

Tripping green

Seeing through windows into the rooms and rooms and rooms of the mind, all shot through with virulent viridescence. Answer me this: how did that mushroom get in there? ;)

Global warning

Print available

Lines of latitude, longitude; compass points; the green of the land; the blue of water; and red, of desert, heat, fire... All spiralling to the singluarity. Are we too late?

The bipolar plugin works its magic.

Plaza

Print available

An entry for the Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2007 that received an 'honourable mention', this was created using a hybrid of 'stained glass' that I developed, and was in fact the forerunner of my most successful work Net webbed wall. The patterns recall seating in public city squares, so colours were chosen to highlight this quality.

"On the plaza
We're dancing slowly lit like photographs
Across the plaza
Toward the shadow of the cenotaph"

- from 'Plaza' by John Foxx

Innerspatial flight

Hot from the rendering engine, my first outing for the wonderful boarders plugin, surely one of the most overtly psychedelic variations. I look forward to further explorations!

Levogyric flux

This has long been awaiting a title. Then a new blog post from Paul Laffoley Fans provided the hook that I needed to hang this on. It had always brought to mind some kind of hyperspatial field, but the idea of time-travel via local distortion of the space-time field hit the mark.

Requiring ultra-high quality to bring out the detail, this is therefore unsuitable for print-size rendering... until computing power advances an order of magnitude :D

The studio

Print available

"As the agent pushed through the door and flicked the switch with theatrical flourish (I half-expected him to pronounce "fiat lux"), all else seemed to recede and the space before me took full command: I was aware of the high roof, the exposed infrastructure and the oddly sulphurous light of the spots - the day's heavy mist seemed to have penetrated the space, yet did nothing to dampen the sudden positive turn of emotion within. Half the floor appeared to be genuine Terrazzo, so incongruous in this loft space. Thoughts forked, branched: winter parties; spring light, once that wall and roof area were given over to glass; fantastic views of the city; and above all, a place to work, to rest, to find peace..."

Clamour

See how they vie for attention!

Illuminati seal

A design for a seal for the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria. I just couldn't resist ;)

Layzee

Sadly not fit for print due to current lack of support from flam3 (for removal of speckle), I nevertheless had to upload my first dabbling with the wonderful lazysusan variation. I forsee a Golden Autumn of experimentation with this indolent inamorata...

Mindspace

Print available

Dare that journey to the farthest antipodes of your consciousness and rest awhile in its resonant, redolent space...

A hybridised disc-Julian, possessing certain qualities of the rings2-Julian style, originally created before I mastered the latter.

This receives the honour of being my first print since it served as test case for the rendering experiments necessary to finalising the process.

Introduction

The inevitable beginning. I have decided to outsource my fractal art from the website to a dedicated blog. With my knowledge of feed mashups, this will actually change very little from the website's point of view but will give the art some more breathing space and provide a useful platform for future development of ideas only now in early gestation.