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Fractal art is not new. Many truly talented, scientifically oriented persons have been making fractals in a DOS environment for quite a few years. The program used is called "Fractint", from which a windows program, Winfract, was developed. Winfract, however, remains difficult to use when developing the obligatory colour maps to render 3D fractals from. Then the new breed of programmers tried their hand at developing more user friendly programs incorporating the necessary parameters, (mathematical formulae), which allowed the artist to try their hand at this medium, without necessarily fully comprehending the mathematics behind the programing.
There are a number of free-ware programs available, a few fairly well known being those developed by Stephen C. Ferguson at "Iterations et Flarium" . The most widely used of these is Tiera-Zon. I used this program, Tiera-Zon 2 and Sterling-Ware to render my fractals. At present, what I come up with is more a matter of random selections of Newton/Mandel parameters (sometimes Julia), some tampering with the RGB settings and some arbitrary use of the filters in the program. As I become more familiar with the program, I'll try to make sure I copy the parameters so I can share them. ;-) |
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This image had an other-world like, almost mystical appearance to it. I wanted to add another element so I chose a piece of clip-art of a wizard, isolated the drawing, resized downwards to 25% and pasted on a new layer adding a complimentary drop shadw. Hence the name "Merlin's Lair" was born. Could almost imagine him casting spells on an unsuspecting universe from the precipice of his kingdom. ;-) The frame and accompanying mat were inspired by a tutorial from Mardi Wetmore called "Frame a Graphic". Please see my links page for the URL for "Web Graphics on a Budget" (if you haven't already been there). ;-) |
The original fractal reminded me of waves and prompted me to consider an ocean scene. There was a hint of red and yellow which I eliminated by colourizing in PSP.
The next search was for the appropriate marine life to compliment it. Found some beautiful dolphins at "Rhonnies Stuff". I automatically knew I was going to call it "Dolphin Playground". The shiny mat was a result of a sunburst gradient with the light and dark blues in the picture. To get the shine I applied Filter Factory A, Greg's pool shadow, (he's an exceptionally talented man). The next effect was a cutout on two separate layers while the mat was still selected. The settings were a black shadow with a blur of 2 and horizontal/vertical settings of 2,-2 and then -2,2. The frame was another border of 18 pixels which was selected and then iriscales.q9q Blade Pro preset by "Dami's Demesne". Dami has volumes of terrific presets! :-) Lastly a drop shadow was applied with the same settings as the cutout. |
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