'tis the season

I want to share my 2010 Christmas card with everyone who reads my blog. I know I don't post nearly often enough, so dear readers of the sporadic, this is for you.

May you find peace and happiness during this holiday season and always.

The Fractal That Was... But Isn't

I know better. I was a PC technician for 21 years. I've told hundreds of peopole, save your work. So what did I do? I didn't save my work. Drat! Rats! Bummer!

Ultra Fractal is a pretty bullet proof piece of software; thanks for that Frederik. Alas, no piece of software is perfect, and I got the dreaded error message that said your creation is fubarred, gone, kaput.

The image was a good one. The gradients and merge modes were just what I wanted. Then I decided to mess around with the image size. If I made it more vertical... no, no.. maybe square... no, no, too big to decide whether I likes that or not. Then, I just wanted to make it fit better on the screen of my laptop, and it happened.

I did send the error report with an explanation. I did try to recreate what I was doing, but my brain just would not cooperate. Now I have fractaler's block. Nothing looks quite good enough. The colors are all wrong. What is a woman to do?

Maybe this would be a good time to go back to beta testing the rkb formulas.

Flowers for Algernon... or Joe... or You

There is a certain power in beta testing a tool for graphic artists. Power? Yes! There are things that I can do (along with my fellow beta testers) that the general Ultra Fractal population cannot. The greatest value that I am seeing in this huge set of formulae is the ease with which one can create an image that once would have taken layer upon layer and mask upon mask to accomplish. Rob Bunney's code, married to Ultra Fractal 5, is really a terrific combination.

Making Inroads in Florida

When I do my creative things in a vacuum, my interest in the work definitely wains. I need a push from the outside to find my way back to the enjoyment I derive from seeing the colors exploding on my screen. Sometimes those colors are a discordant scream, while other hues gently caress the visual sense. My crayon box is huge, but I am certainly drawn to particular sets that I use over and over.

The other day, I got a push that was the direct result of my page on Facebook, The Fractal Art of Madelon Wilson. I'm not sure if you need a Facebook account to view the page. Give it a try and see if it works for you. My cousin sent me a message, on Facebook, asking how she could get some of these. There is nothing like a bit of eager appreciation to fluff up the ego and the desire to get the artwork out there.

We're trading art for massage right now, and she knows a decorator. I gave her some business cards and emailed her a link to my Renderosity gallery.

Now it's back to work on those prints.

The Default Gradient in Ultra Fractal

It never occurred to me until today that part of the genius within the Ultra Fractal program is the gradient provided. All you need to do is open the program to be presented with the blue, then apply a coloring to the Mandelbrot and the other colors - red, orange and white - become apparent.

I recall thinking that these were pretty garrish colors the first time I opened the program and couldn't wait to learn how to change them. This was back in the day of Ultra Fractal 3. As I learned more and more of the mechanics of using the program, I decided that using the default gradient would be a good learning experience. One of the things I learned was that the default gradient and the difference merge mode get along quite well. Somehow the jewel tones produced using difference are always pleasing.

Since that time, I find myself using that gradient for inspiration. Here is a little something I cooked up that uses the General Tent Julia formula and the Orbit Traps coloring. Thanks, Frederik, for the chance for folks like me to create pretty graphics. For me, the genius is in the coloring. I leave the math to those who know what they're doing.

A Single Layer

I find myself trying more options and parameters in Rob Bunney's code. Today, in just a couple of minutes, I discovered that an entire image can be created in a single layer. This may not be the best fractal ever, and it certainly begs a color scheme other than the default UF gradient, but it's one layer! I also find that there is a bit of whimsy here too.

One Shape Makes Great Backgrounds

When I started beta testing Rob Bunney's new formula, I found that I easily got stuck in the rut of trying to make an image using just one plug-in to the One Shape coloring algorithm. I finally branched out a bit and found that by changing the plug-in and the merge mode, I could get some interesting backgrounds.

This background consists of 7 layers that utilize 5 different plug-ins. By varying the gradient and the merge modes, I came up with this blast of stars. Then I had to have something to plop on top of my background. Unfortunately, it was late, and I wasn't driven by creativity. I went to my old images and found an interesting spiral and adapted it to the color scheme suggested by my background. The final result looks pretty good, if I do say so myself.