{"id":64397,"date":"2022-08-22T02:18:57","date_gmt":"2022-08-22T02:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/?p=64397"},"modified":"2022-08-22T02:18:57","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T02:18:57","slug":"fractals-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/blog\/fractals-101\/","title":{"rendered":"Fractals 101"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WFtTdf3I6Ug?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe>Fractal art is the technique of creating a piece of art that has embedded within its layers, smaller copies of the whole piece. Fractal art is a way to create an image that is both large and detailed.<\/p>\n<p>Telling someone to just look at the picture and don&#8217;t think about it too much is not helpful, because in order to understand fractal art you need to understand certain things about fractals. For example, fractals are created through recursion and self-similarity. They can be used in various ways like video games, animation, or any kind of digital imaging where you want something to look realistic but also have an element of randomness.<\/p>\n<p>Some people have been known to dismiss fractal artwork as &#8220;nice&#8221;, but lacking substance. However I believe that these people either do not understand what fractals are or they have not looked at enough good fractal art. Personally I find the idea of an infinite world within a finite space very interesting and engaging.<\/p>\n<p>Now, before we start, let me explain the title of this post. I&#8217;ve always been a sucker for puns, and I&#8217;m terribly fond of fractals.<\/p>\n<p>Fractals are geometric shapes that are self-similar across scales. So, for instance, if you zoom in on one part of a fractal shape you get the same pattern as you do when you look at the whole thing. That is what makes them so interesting to mathematicians and computer scientists: it takes a lot less information to store or transmit an arbitrarily complex fractal than it does an ordinary picture.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to know more, there&#8217;s some good beginner&#8217;s material here , and there&#8217;s plenty of stuff elsewhere too . What I want to talk about today is how they can be used to make art.<\/p>\n<p>Fractal art is much less well known than digital art or computer art but it has some important advantages over those two: You don&#8217;t need any special equipment or software. All you need is something to draw with on paper or a screen. You don&#8217;t need any special talent or skill either: all you need is patience, persistence and a willingness to experiment. And you don&#8217;t have to pay anything extra for fractal art: the skills and tools you need can<\/p>\n<p>Fractal art is the creation of beautiful, naturalistic images using fractals. Fractals are mathematical objects that are self-similar across different scales.<\/p>\n<p>Fractals come in all kinds of flavors. There are &#8220;geometric&#8221; fractals like the Sierpinski triangle and there are &#8220;fractional&#8221; fractals like the Mandelbrot set. Both are equally popular among fractal artists, because the difference is more one of application than one of subject matter. They&#8217;re both fractals.<\/p>\n<p>An important thing to realize about fractals is that they&#8217;re not difficult to create on a computer; in fact, you can make them with a pretty simple line of code. The hard part is getting them to look good; creating an image with that distinctive &#8220;fractal feel.&#8221; This usually involves lots of experimentation and work on colors, shading, and other details.<\/p>\n<p>This site exists to promote fractal art, by providing info on how it&#8217;s done in this day and age, as well as links to websites featuring great examples of contemporary fractal art.<\/p>\n<p>Fractal art is a digital image or video file which uses self-similarity to create the illusion of detail. The term fractal comes from the Latin fractus, meaning broken or irregular. Fractals are typically generated by following a simple set of rules, recursively, using computer software.<\/p>\n<p>Fractals are usually generated by complex algorithms, but there are also fractal art created by hand. These are just as much fractals as the computer-generated ones; they&#8217;re just made in a different way.<\/p>\n<p>(This is quite a lot more sophisticated than &#8220;fractal art&#8221; that&#8217;s actually done on a computer, which is mostly making copies of an existing image at different sizes.)<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a long history of creating pictures with rules, or rather there&#8217;s a long history of *not* creating pictures with rules. In fact, it&#8217;s hard to think of any other technique that&#8217;s been around for so long and yet is still basically unknown to most people.<\/p>\n<p>Looking at the work of people who do this kind of thing (I&#8217;m not sure what else to call it) can give some idea of what the possibilities are. A lot of computer-generated fractal art looks like it was designed by someone who had seen no other art and didn&#8217;t know what colors were. This stuff looks like someone who has seen lots of art and knows about color theory did it. I find that quite impressive.<\/p>\n<p>Fractals have been around for quite a while, but they have recently become more accessible to the average user. Now it is possible to create pretty good fractals using simple techniques.<\/p>\n<p>But why should you bother? First of all, fractals are beautiful and creating them is fun. But there are also numerous applications in science, art and engineering. In this article we will give a short introduction into what fractals are and how they can be used in these areas.<\/p>\n<p>Fractals are a class of mathematical objects. But they are not just numbers. They are more complex than that. And although they look like they are created by the computer, actually you can create them with a pencil and paper!<\/p>\n<p>Fractals show us how interconnected things in nature really are.<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/w_MNQBWQ5DI?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7gyoPIZ_9mA?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fractal art is the technique of creating a piece of art that has embedded within its layers, smaller copies of the whole piece. Fractal art is a way to create an image that is both large and detailed. Telling someone to just look at the picture and don&#8217;t think about it too much is not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64397"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64397"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64399,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64397\/revisions\/64399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}