Wasting copious amounts of time...

...doing things like this:


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

and this:


Julia fractal, with a plastic wrap filter, stretched and pinched and overlaid on itself.

and even this:


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.

My own private art gallery

As I noted earlier, I've been thinking of dressing up the stark and barren wildernesses that are the walls of my office. A hunt around in the dark void that is the space under the stairs where outdated artwork, the odd exercise machine, and the luggage are all kept revealed absolutely nothing useful, unless you count dodgy floral prints and a beer poster or two. So, on to plan B, which was asking you lot for advice. After receiving a large number (note 1) of very useful (note 2) suggestions, I've decided, for now anyway, to put the following bits of my own digital art on my wall (thanks, Debi, for the encouragement).


Some kind of music collage multimedia thing.


The same thing after extensive Photoshoppery monkeyshines.

Printed at 8 and a half by 11 inches with a cheap HP inkjet on matte brochure paper, and displayed in frameless glass picture mounts from the local dollar store, they look rather attractive but a bit small and lost. It's a start, though. My co-workers have very kindly hidden their confusion and made only polite noises so far (at least in my presence).

I've since added these two, which the discerning of eye will realize are simply slightly processed negatives of the others:





Actually, I reduced the contrast on the last one and applied a bit of warming filter, to make it a bit less stark black and white than what's shown here, but you get the idea, I think.

All of these were derived from this awful piece of, and I use the term loosely, multimedia art, which I made in late 1987 or possibly early 1988:


Paper, markers, crayon, paint and glue.


Next up: photographs. Of birds' nests, rocks, fence rails, flowers, and the like. You've been warned.


Note 1: not.
Note 2: not.

Boo!

Not much to report... just been playing around a bit with Vexer, a rather fun but almost incomprehensible graphic art tool that Mike, who hangs out over at Flickr, turned me on to. It's loads of fun to play with, if somewhat unpredictable and almost completely lacking in instructions.

Here's a photo of mine, given the Vexer treatment:



And some more crazy stuff:



More in the art set.

Everything above links through to the Flickr photos, since, once again, the Blogger image upload tool is broken.