Posts Tagged eye-candy

Mandalas Gallery 01

Aug 9

Posted by Mr. Mandelbrot in Galleries, Images | No Comments

Sorry for the long time without any posts but this is not a daily job, is it? OK, enough rantings.

As I said in the previous post I tried the Mandala Project or something. I opened all my UPRs one by one (well not all yet) and applied a kaleidoscope transformation on each layer to create the mandala-like images. Some images work better than others, some images don’t work at all, some give birth to a lot of new images and so on.

For the creation process, I didn’t change any of the original image’s fractal parameters, I just applied the kaleidoscope on the layers and that was it. In very few cases, I did some extra zooming when I thought I could find something more interesting a little deeper, but this wasn’t the case with all images. Of course, lots of panning work was a must to find good images, but there are some images that are just the original image with the transformation without any panning, applied to the image with its original coordinates. Also, I made the “mandalas” in the same order as I made the original images, I started with my very first (saved) image, and went on from there. I’m not sure where I am at this point now (I have about 50 images already made), but I think I’ve tried at least a whole year of images or maybe half a year of UPRs. And this is… still 2002? I think so.

For me, it’s a bit easier to spot the original image that was transformed, but sometimes there aren’t much hints and the new image is a bit different, although it still can be recognizable maybe from its colour scheme. Some “mandalas” kept some parts (or visual characteristics) of the original images a bit intact, like mandelbrot shapes, etc. etc. and this was done on purpose sometimes.

This project is something I’m doing just for fun, while I don’t have enough new images to be added to new fractal galleries.

Here are the first gallery, with 15 images (I guess 16 will look better… maybe I’ll change that):

[View with PicLens]

As some people with some a good attention span might have noticed, the watermark now shows “www.mundofractal.com”. I could grab this domain name and now you can use both the .net or the .com extensions. Hopefully Google won’t get pissed at me for redirecting a domain to this URL.

Tags: 2002, abstract, art, chaos, digital art, examples, eye-candy, fractals, gallery, Google, image, inspiration, kaleidoscope, mandala, rant, Ultra Fractal, watermark

Mandalas, maybe

Mar 23

Posted by Mr. Mandelbrot in General, Images | No Comments

I read something about mandalas this week (Jung studied them, never heard of that before) and was wondering if I should make some. I am not an expert about them, have no idea about their meanings or if there are particular styles of mandalas, I am just doing something for fun. I’m not very fond of them, but not because they aren’t visually attractive. They are, sometimes, but as it’s so easy to make one from a fractal image within UF that I am not really interested. It’s too simple, although sometimes there are some very interesting images. At the same time, it’s a bit unpredictable if a good “mandala” will appear. I’m not sure if even these images can be called mandalas, if there’s some special characteristic that makes an image to be able to be called like that, just like the fractals (self-similarity etc. etc.).

I am picking all my saved fractals and applying the “mandala” trick on them – it’s the kaleidoscope transformation of UF, applied on every layer of the image – and if something interesting appears, I’m saving the image. It’s interesting how some very good fractals don’t give me any interesting mandala, and vice-versa. I’m keeeping mostly the default settings of the transformation, but sometimes I’m changing things a little bit. Also, I’m zooming in/out as needed. At first I thought it would be cheating, as I thought of making a mandala just with what the original image could give me, but why not change the rules a bit? Rules? Which rules?

Again, as soon as there are enough images for a gallery, they will be posted all at once, about 16 or 20 at a time. Maybe in a special section, who knows.

Tags: art, cheating, digital art, eye-candy, fractals, image, Jung, kaleidoscope, mandala, rules, self-similarity, UF transformation, Ultra Fractal

Fractal Gallery 37

Feb 20

Posted by Mr. Mandelbrot in Galleries, Images | 4 Comments

Descriptions on the images will be added later. It has way more images than planned, it will be fixed soon. Also there are some huge images this time. Whatever. One of these images has a cheating, I had to fix its contrast in Photoshop.

[View with PicLens]

$fractal-crab$

$fractal-diet$

$fractint-rainbow$

Tags: abstract, art, boredom, chaos, colours, digital art, eye-candy, fractals, Fractint, gallery, image, image names, inspiration, Ultra Fractal

Happy birthday, John!

Oct 10

Posted by Mr. Mandelbrot in General, Images | No Comments

A day late, but happy 70th birthday. I wonder how things could have been gone musically if these 4 still had time and the chance to put aside their differences and at least for one more time bring us back to the time when music and rock’n'roll used to be fun. Anyway… here comes a fractal image that is related to this guy, his band, and obviously, the 60′s culture.

The first time The Beatles experienced LSD was sort of an accident. Or at least, it didn’t happen because they deliberately did or wanted it to happen. They were gathered for a tea in the evening at George dentist’s house, all the 4 guys and their wives plus the dentist and his wife. He slipped some LSD into their coffees… and the rest is history. This is probably one of the sugar cubes that were at the event:

Beatle Sugar Cube

“It was the Beatles’ first experience of the drug – one which made the small room of the flat in Strathearn Place ‘as big as the Albert Hall’ according to Cynthia and gave George the impression that he was ‘falling in love’ with everyone he met after later driving the group in his Mini to the Pickwick Club and Ad Lib, near Leicester Square.” (source)

Tags: 3D, abstract, acid, art, chaos, coffee, colours, drugs, eye-candy, fractals, George Harrison, image, image names, inspiration, John Lennon, LSD, Mandelbulb, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, rock'n'roll, tea, The Beatles, wicked dentist

My thoughts on a certain calendar

Oct 9

Posted by Mr. Mandelbrot in General | 1 Comment

I hope this post doesn’t bring any negativity or haters. I’ve seen this happen when the subject was so delicate (to some people) like this. But here we go.

I had read in another blog – which I won’t mention here which one it is just because of these fights and haters, but it has been mentioned here a couple times and I do share many of their thoughts about how and where the fractal art is going – about how the Fractal Calendar was becoming sort of a… how to put it lightly… commercial product supposedly open to the fractal artists community to participate, but a project where just a few people had the chance to participate. And it’s always been the same people over and over, year after year. This is what I had read, remember. As I’m not involved with these groups, I just know the names of some of these artists and saw that there was really some sort of repetitive list of fractal artists that seemed to appear quite often. Then, it was also commented that the images chosen to appear in such calendar were getting more and more boring and common and were not displaying the “good” fractal art (whatever that is), but just the eye-candy, with the same style that is typical of that specific group of “chosen ones”.

Today, when I was going to the Fractal Forums website to get the latest Mandelbulb version for my other computer, I typed a wrong address that took me apparently to the official site for the Fractal Calendar. And they had 3 galleries for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 editions with the images. And now I could see with my own eyes that this was very much true, the images are indeed boring and repetitive. They aren’t ugly, though. But 12 images of common spirals and Doodads? I can do that too. Sometimes better. Many others can do that as well.

I think that the last time I had checked for the images in that calendar was around 2003, when I even submitted some images (silly me…). The same group of people seemed to dominate the choices of approved images back then, but the images were much more better and diverse. Now, they’re just as I’ve said, common spirals and Doodads. Sad, really.

Not that these artists aren’t talented and can’t make good images, the problem I see – IMHO – is that the images are far from being fresh, creative and daunting or even “updated”, they are just something that seem to have been done to fit a certain commitment, “we must do the calendar, you are the chosen artists, just send me anything in time and that’s fine”.

With the huge ammount of fractal softwares – and fractal kinds so to speak – now available, it’s sad to see that they have chosen just common spirals done in Ultra Fractal. No Apophysis, no old-school Fractint images, no new styles like the Mandelbulbs. And just spirals. While the time in the calendar goes on for all of us, the quality of its images seem to be going back in time. Or the clock seems to have stopped in 2002 for the people that are responsible to choose the images.

A small disclaimer: I don’t know any of the artists involved in the making of the images chosen for the calendar in any way other than occasionally viewing fractal galleries where their images are displayed, in their own websites or in other galleries in other websites. I don’t have any particular “hate” for any of these neither had any personal fights with any of these artists and this wasn’t a personal attack on anyone (before any of these haters that like to keep starting flame wars in the aforementioned blog find an excuse in this post to start some more of these wars), this was just my personal opinion on the Fractal Calendar (to which you are entitled to disagree) and my comments are mostly made about the way it’s made and conceived and how its images are chosen, not about the talent or the quality of any of these fractal artists involved.