Friday, March 07, 2008

Wasting copious amounts of time...

...doing things like this:

nebulous excursion
A flame fractal, with some clouds and a lens flare.

and this:

The Princess' Lace Gown (detail)
Julia fractal, with a plastic wrap filter, stretched and pinched and overlaid on itself.

and even this:

dual_flower
Another fractal, colour somewhat tweaked in Photoshop.

Ridiculous. This is what comes of having a full installation of Photoshop CS2, an open internet connection, and tripping across people like Song_sing on Flickr. If you like these fractals, check out her stuff - some of it will blow your eyes out, like this picture, or this one.

And of course, she turned me on to Tierazon (which was used for the second and third of the above, before the usual Photoshop jiggery-pokery), a nifty little freely download-able fractal drawing program that works pretty well and doesn't consume massive amounts of your computer's CPU cycles.

Which then led to exploring the Tierazon group on Flickr, other fractal groups like this one, and more general digital artwork ones such as Digital Abstract, Pixel Art, and the aptly-named Abstract Nonsense. All of which led me to some other fun and publicly available tools, like ChaosPro (which I used for the flame fractal at the top of this post) and the trial version of ArtRage, which I have yet to try out, but can be used to make things like this nice little "painting".

All of which, as I noted at the beginning of this post, adds up to a huge waste expenditure of time. Ah well, at least I have a hard drive full of shiny things as a result.

More in the art set.

3 comments:

#Debi said...

I like #1 the best (what can I say, I like green), with #2 a close 2nd. I think that I will try out that ArtRage thing myself, since it's available in a Mac version. It looks like it could be handy for illustrating...

Btw, could you explain what exactly is a fractal? :)

Richard Wintle said...

Um, er *scratches head*.

A fractal is I think a mathematical formula that describes a geometrical shape. There are lots of variations. The key thing is that it's recursive, i.e. the same pattern is repeated over and over again at ever-smaller scales, so if you zoom in you see the same pattern repeating.

Of course, that's probably totally over-simplified and/or wrong, but you get the idea. Gives you these really complex shapes.

Anonymous said...

http://ricardipus.blogspot.com/2008/03/wasting-copious-amounts-of-time.html
Thats a fairly good decription of a fractal.
I would say its like a artistic expression of mathematical formula.
You are picking up the fractal programs Tierazon & Chaos pro at a higher than average pace I think as
well as gifted photographer plus your light side of seeing things with a sense of humor.