Amy Hunter

Years ago, my friend Alicia introduced me to fractal art, and I was immediately fascinated. When you look at her images, you’ll see why–they’re beautiful. We each explored a couple of programs for creating these: Tierazon (which now costs $35 to download, and I have no idea if it works with newer operating systems), and Apophysis (which remains free). I haven’t done any fractal art in years, though. It’s something that captures my fancy for a while, and then I move on to other things. (Yes, I know–like all of my other creative endeavors!)

Anyway, Alicia recently did some fractals, and seeing those got me itching to play again. So I downloaded Apophysis. Tierazon is a lot easier to work with if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing–which I never have. I just liked playing with the pretty colors and shapes. But the last time I did fractals, I kind of felt I’d explored what I could explore with that software. Even though I’ve never grasped Apophysis well, it seemed to offer a lot more control. If only I could understand what I was doing!

With the explosion of YouTube, though, there are now better tutorials out there. The second one I found was exactly what I needed:

Here’s my first fractal that I intentionally created from the ground up:

The next two are via my old method of letting the program generate fractals radomly, then going in and hacking around:

You can get beautiful results either way, but the random method generates a lot of stuff you don’t want to keep. Plus, where there were good starting points, it was frustrating to not know how to nudge them in fruitful directions. Armed with fresh knowledge, though, I can see myself doing more exploring this fall and winter. Plus, there might be interesting ways to combine my photography with fractals using Photoshop. Opportunities abound!