Winds, Waves, ,and Cable Stays

This flame has a slightly more evocative title than I usually go for, because I could make it both rhyme and alliterate. It's probably just a near rhyme, but I'm not a poetry nerd, so I don't know or care if it is or not.

I'm not entirely sure if this flame is supposed to represent a specific structure, or even broad class of structures. I assume it is a structure, since it has cable stays. If it is, it's a poorly lit, only dimly visible object. I kind of like it that way. Knowing exactly what it was would take some of the fun out of it.

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Painted Conch

My mother owns a little seashell that has had the outer layers polished off of it in spots, exposing the mother of pearl underneath. (A little bit of googling leads me to believe it may be the shell of a Turbo Sarmaticus) It gives it a very unusual coloration; not quite like the flame at left, but pretty close. The real object has less blue. I wasn't really thinking of that seashell when I created and named this piece, but I was reminded strongly of it when I looked at this flame again. It's odd how stuff like that happens.

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Lasing Cavity

I consider the name on this piece to be mediocre, but I really like the piece itself. The textures and shapes have a really fluid, billowy feel to them that is just cool to me. A lot of the pieces I really like have that sort of...mental sensation, I guess you could call it, to them. I don't like the squiggly jet quite so much, but it does provide a needed contrast to the rest of the piece. The colors could use some work, though. This piece is from back when I was still learning how to use them effectively.

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Fern Mat

I really like the way the composition on this piece turned out. Most of the mass of the image is spread out, but the focus ends up being that blue and green section around the negative spiral parts. The colors also seem to introduce a little of that false-illumination effect that's shown up in a few other flames. I also think that the beige sort of color goes really nicely with the green and blue shades. Although maybe my saying that is redundant; obviously I liked it or I wouldn't have used it (Well, except for the times I've used colors I don't like and complained about. So scratch the redundancy comment.)

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Glitter in the mud

This flame started out blue. But that looked silly, so now it's brown. I did some various other fiddling with it, mostly figuring out which part was most interesting and focusing the camera on that section.

This is another of those flames that uses a tiny, tiny repeat to create a glittery, sparkly effect. I hope I get a chance to figure out what exactly the best way to render these for printing is sometime soon, because I know 'Copper Flakes' gave me a lot of grief. Apophysis does this weird thing where it rounds really small elements up to one pixel in size on the render. So if the glittery bits are too small, when I shift the render size from 1280x1024 to 3000x2400, the glittery bits are five times smaller and invisible on the prints. It's very strange.

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Non-Euclidean Ripples

I like to imagine all of these ripple patterns were caused by a single event taking place in a bizarrely folded geometry. Of course, I also like thinking about how it would work to perceive time as a dimension instead of linearly, so that might just be my little quirk.

This piece is another startlingly simple flame. Just looking at it I would assume it was fairly complicated, but that's not the case. It only has two repeats; one creates the ripple effect, the other causes the spiraling repetitions down towards the center. This piece is about two years old, and it seems that during that period I was switching off between 'really simple' and 'really complex' as working styles.

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Download links: Right click and hit 'Save Link As' to download. If you just want to look at a larger version of the image, simply follow the link.

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Fighting Dustclouds

It certainly wasn't my intention when I named this piece, but it occurs to me that the name could mean those dustclouds you see in cartoons that always surround people who are fighting. You know, arms and legs occasionally flailing outside it, sound effects emanating from within...but as I said, that wasn't the intention. I was thinking more along the lines of eddies and whirls of dust laden air colliding and mingling.

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Trajectory

I've moved away from this style of flame, but I used to work with them quite often. I think these pieces based on the 'spiral' variation have a lot of good points, but I prefer the denser, smoother textures that I can produce with other variations. Still, I do like this flame. It feels very swooshy. And I can't quite tell for certain, but I'm pretty sure that's gradient #209. Not one of my better uses of it, really. This piece would be improved by an absence of beige.

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Bumblebee, from above

I'm sure there are some of you out there who will look at this flame and say "But that doesn't look like a bumblebee at all!" My response to you: Phhhhlbbbbt. Almost never are these titles hard and fast rules about what a flame 'is'. Obviously there are exceptions, but very rarely do I have a fixed object or thing or theme that a flame must be interpreted as. The title of a piece is a suggestion to try and make the piece more interesting.

think the best example of what I mean by this is the piece 'Magnetic Flares' from the store. It started life with the lowly designation 'Apophysis-041219-100', which is about as unpoetic as a name can get. It simply means that it was the hundredth random flame done on December 19, 2004. I ask you, which title makes you more likely to really think about the flame? Even the pieces that I title 'Abstract' get a better reception than that designation. The word invites you to think about the piece and decide what it is for yourself.

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Resonators (recolor)

Sound effects are not optional for this flame. I encourage you to make a noise such as "Vwoooooooorn" or "Bzzzzzzz" or possibly even "WOMwomWOMwomWOMwomWOMwom" as you view this piece. If you imagine all the blurry spike things vibrating back and forth as you do that it will help.

This is the second version of this flame, and unusually enough I didn't do it right after the first version. I liked the original well enough to feel like I needed to go back and tweak it a bit. The first version was more brown and less orange, and it was just too dull. I'm still not entirely happy with the color scheme. It's rather monotone. But it is an improvement.

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Temple Throne

This piece is the sort of thing that turns up when I play with symmetry. I don't do it very often, mostly because it takes longer and it's harder to produce a good result. But I think this one turned out quite nicely. I encourage you to take a look at the larger versions of this piece, and look for faces. There are at least a couple spots in this piece that I think look like faces or people. I'll let you find them for yourselves, though.

Temple Throne (inset)

A closeup of what I like to think of as the statues and engravings above the throne. I like the main piece better, but I wanted a closer look at the details, and this was the easiest way to do that.

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Temple Throne:

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Temple Throne (inset):

Illusionometer

Just a reminder, two posts today. Scroll down for the first.

The negative space in this flame is almost more interesting than the flame itself. The set of alternating curves that's part of the main repeat really catches the eye. I also really like the way it goes fractal in two directions at once. There's that ladder structure out on an arm, right? That's obviously fractal repeats, with a little bit of foreshortening distortion on it. But that whole arm structure repeats back up into the piece and off canvas.

Speaking of off canvas...Normally I like to get the entirety of a flame in frame, but the interesting details of this piece (like that ladder-arm thing) never got to a big enough scale to show up well with the rest of the flame in view. I do have a version of this with everything in frame. It looks a little like either a demented swan or a boat with a really strange figurehead.

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Hypnosis

Go buy something...go buy something...the swirly thing commands you...

This flame is a surprisingly complex result from a fairly simple set of parameters. There's one 'body' element in it, and three basic repeat elements twisted to form the spiral shape. I have to say that this one didn't remain as my desktop background for very long. I prefer something just a little more restful. Still, this would be a lot of fun as a piece of wall art. I really hope I get the chance to print it some day.

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Space-Goo

While I'm fairly confident in the gooeyness of this piece, I'm not precisely certain why it's gooey in space (Hehe!). It doesn't really seem to have a specific up or down to it, or fixed points of attachment or support...so I suppose that could be one reason. It's just as easy to apply that reasoning to an object with neutral buoyancy underwater, though.

This flame has a few relatives. The image you see is pretty much my second draft; I did a version of this flame that lacked some of the repeats present here, and then came back and added them in and fiddled with the colors. I fiddled with the colors again later on, and depending on how fast I run out of flames to show you folks you might get to see that version too.

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Stained Lace

I really like the way the colors are distributed in this flame. For the most part, they merge seamlessly. The dark red and blue down at the bottom don't, but I think the piece would be boring if the colors were that uniform. The observant may recognize Gradient 209, but I have no shame over using it in this particular piece. It's a much more recent work, and I hadn't used it in months, I'm sure.

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Leaf Tones

I actually got pretty green colors in this flame. Not very many, but some. Greens are incredibly difficult to make look good on computer monitors, for some reason. Something to do with the way the RGB color scheme works, I guess. Anyway, I was really pleased with the color palette for this flame. It's got a rather interesting texture, as well, but the color is mostly what I wanted to show off with this one.

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Flowering Crystals

Ten points to anybody who gets the literary reference. This piece has some fairly obvious fractal elements, but it doesn't beat you over the head with them. The sort of...'bubble' of faint bits that traces around the edges of the flame is rather interesting, and I like the way it smoothes out the the borders. Looking at it now I'm thinking that lime green and tan with aqua and purple might be a little bit of an unorthodox color choice. But fah! I defy orthodox color choices!

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Lemon Acrophobia

Alternate title: Gratuitous overuse of spiral shapes. I figure this is what happens when someone who's afraid of heights (i.e. an acrophobe) stands a couple stories over a big bin of lemons. The worlds starts spinning, tunnel vision...all that sort of stuff. I'm afraid I don't really have anything deep and meaningful to say about this flame. It's just not a deep and meaningful sort of image. So I hope you enjoy looking at a pretty picture.

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Beak of the Squid

Fun flame, weird name. The colors are a little too monotone, but the random elements to the texture and shape make up for it. It's been years since I made this one, but without opening up Apophysis and looking at its innards I'd say this made liberal use of both the 'Waves' and the 'Spiral' variations. You can see an example of 'Waves' here, here, and here. I don't really have a clean example of the 'Spiral' variation. The easiest way to describe it is that it pulls the flame up and to the right in a big, sparse loop. There's some folding and inversion involved at the same time.

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Exploding Gas Giant

Do gas giants come in pink? Does anybody know? This flame is the sibling to 'Boiling Planet.' I figured I might as well stick the two of them together and save the trouble of a hyperlink. Overall I think 'Gas Giant' is the superior of the two flames. I can't really point to a specific reason, that's just the way I feel. Go figure.

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Coral Garden

While there are things about this image that I don't like, the overall resemblance to coral and sponges and other underwater beasties wins out. This flame is a bit messy, especially over on the upper left. I think I'd need to mess around with the 'weights' a bit to get it to work. (Those of you who have used Apophysis will probably know what I'm talking about.)

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Clef

This is the second flame I've done that has reminded me of a musical clef. In this case, it reminded me of the Treble clef. I like the strong central line in the body of this flame, with the projections and swirls coming out from it. The color placement in 'Clef' really helps to emphasize this.

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Vanishing Feathers

I really like the way that the colors, shape, and title of this piece work together. I'm always pleased when I can come up with an image that first, looks good, and second, can look like something with a little nudging. That moment of 'Oh, hey! It does look like...' is one of my favorite things about this art medium. 'Vanishing Feathers' is one of those images. I have to wonder what that poor bird is being sucked into, though...

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