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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Flower's Pearl

When I make a flame like this, I start thinking I don't know nearly enough about the possible tricks and techniques of this art form to say I have anything resembling a 'style' yet. There are so many wildly divergent possibilities, and I've only scratched the surface. Maybe that's a good thing; if this stopped being a learning process, it wouldn't be as much fun.

When I re-rendered this piece in the 16:10 ratio, something surprising popped up: A line spiraling outwards from the center of the pearl. It's repeated elsewhere in the piece, although the distortions make it difficult to pick out. I have no idea where it came from, or why it doesn't show up in the only-slightly-smaller 5:4 render. It doesn't mar the piece any, but I'd very much like to know why it's there.

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Green Tide

The color and texture of this flame are my favorite things about it. The green shades go all the way from almost-blue to almost-yellow (although there are really only three gradations present), counterbalanced by the slight purplish tint of the brighter areas. The elongated lines that make up the flame remind me of a photograph with an over-long exposure time; blurred and static, but still conveying motion.

I had a really hard time positioning this piece on the canvas. The dark green section on the right-hand side continues a lot farther than I'd have liked it too, and it started looking fuzzy and grainy, just as the smaller repeats of it do. I generally don't like to cut off just a small piece of a flame the way I've done here, but it turned out to be the best solution without altering the shape of the flame.

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Bird and Sharks

I'm not certain which part is the bird and which part is the sharks. Obviously they're all thrashing around a bit, kicking up foam and spray and other such things. Pretty sure there are some toothy bits in there, though. I wouldn't want to be the bird.

I really like the colors in this flame, especially where they start getting denser in the smaller repeats. It's an understated palette, but I think it works for this piece, making some sections shiny and some dull.

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Fish-mouse

This flame sort of reminded me of a fish, and at the same time put me in mind of a mouse or other small rodent. Hence, Fish-mouse. The fact that it's approximately chartreuse didn't enter into consideration. It's not a particularly eye-searing shade, for chartreuse. I actually quite like it, especially in combination with the more blue-ish green and the light pink or lavender 'fins.'

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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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Portal in the Mist

For one reason and another I've always really liked this flame, even though I know it's not the greatest aesthetically. Part of it is probably the balance of colors in the piece; the colors themselves aren't a very appealing set, but the range of hues and intensities is good. The wavy shapes and textures are interesting, but the overall shape isn't that great; that pixelated patch in the bottom left really hurts the rest of the piece. Ah well. Somehow I still like this piece. I hope you do too, in spite of any failings it may have.

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Alien Leaves

When I look at this piece, it looks like there's a line of plants in the background, which are reflected in a body of water, and then there's another little clump of plants in the foreground. Of course, that whole shape is fractally repeated in that spur up at the top, and it spirals down all the way into "invisibly small" territory. I don't know how you could interpret that in real world terms.

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Skeins of Sky

I'm quite fond of this piece. The little specks really sell the name. I think if I were to spend some more time working on it, the only thing I'd want to change is the color of that reddish section running through the middle. It doesn't fit, somehow. But overall I'm very happy with this flame. Somebody feel like giving me an excuse to do a print run?

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Aurora 2

I don't know whether these colors are actually possible in an aurora. But it would be very cool if they were. According to wikipedia it's possible to have green, red, and blue as the base colors for an aurora. Those are the only colors your computer screen can actually produce, so maybe...

It's a little bit embarassing, but I wasn't actually sure if there was an 'Aurora' already when I named this piece. So I tacked a '2' on the end just in case. Fortunately I did have a piece titled 'Aurora' already. I would have felt pretty silly if there hadn't been. For the curious, that first piece can be seen here. I posted it about four and a half months ago.

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Streams of Consciousness

When I named this flame I was thinking "Hmm. It's kind of stereotypically brain-colored. And it's got elements that can be loosely described as 'streams'...Aha! Brilliant!" except that I didn't really think it was brilliant. I wasn't terribly happy with the piece overall, and I just wanted to hurry up and render it so I could stop working. I do like the textures quite a bit, though. I think my main problem with this piece is the colors, although it's not any great shakes compositionally. If the colors were a little less jumbled up I think it would be a big improvement.

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Silicon Autotroph

If I didn't like using fancy science-type words so much this flame would probably be titled something like 'Glass Fern' or 'Stone Bush.' But I do, so it's titled 'Silicon Autotroph.' A slightly more generic term, to be sure, but also a less limiting one. Make of it what you will.

This piece is fairly straightforward, technically. It's got quite a few repeats involved, but most of them are the standard 'linear' type. They don't have any distortion except stretching and skewing. That's probably why this flame calls to mind a plant of some sort. It's closer to a 'pure' fractal, and plants are very fractal things.

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Alien Shrubbery

No, there's no Monty Python joke intended here, which I'm sure some of you will take as a great loss. Tough beans. I rather like the idea of decorative gardens on an alien planet, though. It's one that's used a lot in most soft sci-fi set in space, but that's because it's a cool idea. The sheer variety of plant species and breeds on Earth is staggering. Once you start multiplying that by two or ten or a hundred, and start adding in things like carnivorous carnations and ambulatory azaleas...Like I said, I like the concept.

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Dragon Egg

It takes a touch of imagination to imagine an egg shape in this flame, but I think the texture and color fit the title quite nicely. Besides, who says dragons have to have round eggs? I think misshapen, leathery, scale-covered sacks would be just the thing for a pyromaniac infant.

What's really interesting about this flame to me (besides the pretty-to-look-at part) is that it doesn'tuse any distorted repeats. It's all just flat, and all of the shapes you see are produced by rotated repeats, and maybe a little bit of stretching here and there. It makes for some interesting textures, and quite a bit of blurriness where the detail goes too fine for the computer to render it.

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Alien Peacock

This beastie is a peacock only in the sense that it has markings that look like eyespots. I doubt it can fly, and those probably aren't even feathers. And are those fangs? Claws?

The fractal nature of this piece shows up really well because of the color scheme. The contrast between the two sections of the main flame makes it really easy to see where each individual repeat is, and just how far down in scale the repeats go. Forever, mathematically, but only as far down as the pixels hold out for digital images.

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Erinyes

Whoo, gratuitous mythology references! I can't say that this flame looks particuraly like an avenging spirit bent on punishing oathbreakers, but I'm not sure what does. I do like the impression of hands or claws speeding down on something, and I suppose that's what inspired the title.

The ray effect in this piece (the long thin lines going off to the top left and top of the canvas) isn't one I use very often. Typically if I'm looking to create an illusion of motion I'll use a fractal repeat that diminishes in size with each iteration, producing a trail that tapers as it moves away from the main body of the flame. I've done the opposite here, with the repeats getting larger as they move away from the main piece.

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Surfing

I'm not too certain about the title on this one. Maybe it's an indoor wave simulator, and it's being lit with brightly colored spotlights for some sort of crazy party? Literal interpretations aside, the shape of this flame conveyed such a feeling of fluid motion to me that 'Surfing' was the only name that seemed to fit.

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Cratering

A fairly simple flame, with lots of obvious fractal elements. I actually worked on this flame with the general effect and title in mind, which is not how I usually do things. I'd say it's a fairly good impression of impact scars (although I kind of have to say that, since I'm the one that made it). The purple color may have been an unfortunate choice; I think a mix of gray tones with blue, purple, and brown hints would have been better.

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Thumbprint

Perhaps it's a little feathery looking for a thumbprint, but 'featherprint' just sounded wrong. The colors here are rather muted, but I think bright colors with blurry looking flames like this one (not all blurry flames, just this particular style) are a little jarring. The fact that these are some of my favorite shades has nothing whatsoever to do with my choice, of course. What would make you think that?

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Trying to be Square

I really like the colors, textures and shapes presented in this image for their own sake. But the idea of all these pieces and shards and curves trying to force themselves into their little box and failing appeals to my sense of poetry. I know it's dreadfully cliche, but there's a reason we all like that cliche so much.

Compositionally, this flame uses one of my favorite techniques. Any time you have regular features that are parallel or perpendicular to the sides of the canvas, you alter the way people look at a piece. With my work, I've found that rotating those features out of true with the sides of the canvas makes it easier to see the image, instead of the box it lives in. That tiny bit of irregularity or asymmetry seems to draw people in.

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Exploding Submarine

Probably a sign that I liked the movie 'Red October' way too much when I was a child. Ah well. You can't beat Sean Connery. This flame is 'Disentegration's sibling, produced by mutation and a little fiddling. As you can see, they've got an identical color scheme, and a lot of the elements are the same. The textures in 'Submarine' are a little bit smaller and more complex, and the shape has changed a bunch. I almost wish I'd missed a day so I would have had an excuse to post both of these at once, but it's probably better this way.

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Disintegration

This flame really needs sound effects. Something along the lines of a rattling, vibrating electrical hum. Maybe a bass rumble to go along with it. I really like the wobbly, teetering feel to this piece. Add in the wavy blurs that make it look like it's vibrating and it really is a good fit for the title. You can clearly see fractal repeats of the main shape, too, which is a little unusual for this kind of flame.

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Smoldering Spiderweb

I bet that smells really bad up close. Like burning hair. I don't know, what does burning spidersilk smell like? The lines and textures in this piece are really fun. The main variant combination here is the same as the one I used in 'Abstract 7-21-07,' although it produces a slightly different effect here. It seems to be quite a versatile technique.

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Fog

One of my very earliest works, 'Fog' was done in early 2005. This is one of my few early flames that really suceeds at color, mostly because it doesn't have very much of it. The pale lavender and green shades counter each other nicely, and fit well with the texture and shape. I was quite lucky to get that particular premade gradient for this flame. Speaking of the texture and shape, I suppose they reminded me more of the wisps fo smoke you get when you blow out a candle and it smolders for a while than fog. But hey, I'd only done thirty flames at the time. Naming conventions hadn't yet become settled.

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Anemones (second view)

I'm quite fond of the 'tentacle' effect in this flame, but it's unfortunately linked rather closely to the other things that make this flame interesting. Kind of hard to transfer without it being just a copy of the original with a few tweaks. The 'second view' business in the title refers to the fact that this was the second render of this flame I did. The first one had the canvas centered a little further towards the base of the image, and the colors in that segment looked unfortunately like blood in the water. So instead we have this nice, mostly-pastel version with an unwieldy title. Pay no attention to the red over on the left. It's um...algae. Yeah. Algae. Let's go with that.

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Dragon's Spine

Another recent work, and one that I'm quite pleased with. The patterning on this flame almost seems like zebra stripes or something similar. I'm always delighted when I get an effect that makes use of the 'negative' space in a piece. At the same time, though, this makes it a bit awkward to try and transfer the piece to a different color of background in the future.

Note that the widescreen version of this is matted; I wanted to keep the same aspect ratio on the actual flame this time.

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Pipe Organ

Okay, so it has fifteen keyboards and takes twenty years to learn to play. But hey, it's purple! I like the textures in this piece, especially in the bottom half. I've used a similar technique to get the same texture in a number of different flames. Waves variation and spherical variation on the same triangle, for those of you who dabble.

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Fairy in a bubble

When I tell people the title of this flame, most of them say something along the lines of "Huh. So it is." Another piece done with many repeated segments (you could probably count them individually in this one if you wanted to), this one also has a little bit of faux lense-flare and little glowy bits. Little glowy bits are always interesting.

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Otherworldly Vortex

While fairly monotone, I think the little hints of color are all this flame really needs. The emphasis here is on the shape, not the shade. Notice that the secondary spirals are going the opposite direction from the main spiral. That, and the stretching, wobbly distortions on the secondary spirals are what really make this an interesting piece.

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Fibers and feathers

I like the impression of lighting on this flame. It looks like it has a spotlight aimed at it, or as if it's partly in shadow. I have no idea whether that was intentional or not. I'd like to think it was, but it was probably serendipity. Most of the truly interesting flames I come up with are at least half accident.

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Holes in the universe

I'd probably been reading a lot of sciencey stuff when I named this one. Or science-fiction, possibly. For whatever reason, this flame made me say 'three dimensional representation of a four dimensional phenomena; what kind?' And since there were hole-type thingies in there...Anyway, the mix of colors in this one is fun. They're all fairly muted, but they cover a pretty good slice of the rainbow.

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Starspume

Spume (noun): Frothy matter or liquids. This is spume...in space! (Warning: TVtropes link. Abandon all hope, ye who hyperlink here.) Really though, this is the kind of exhaust a really awesome spaceship should put out. 'Starspume' has a very similar color set to 'Shimmery' that I posted recently, which lends it that delightful shiny effect.

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Dustbunny

This is what happens when magicians and mad scientists forget to do their housecleaning. The dustbunnies come alive, and start hunting, painting themselves with spilled strawberry milk mix and tang powder, and wearing little tiny tribal war masks. Soon they may escalate to stealing the cat's hair while it sleeps.

'Dustbunny' really has a lot of different things going on at once, maybe too many. I think it works okay, though, mostly because everything that's happening in the piece is passed through or wrapped around a central area.

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Shimmery

If this were a real object, it would be rippling gently and making a 'Schwaaaaaaaaaa' sound effect. It might also be engulfing mesmerized bystanders and digesting them, but I don't like to speculate. I love the smooth texture the wavy segments around the edges have; those, in combination with the silvery-pink color, give 'Shimmery' its unique look.

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Ocean draining through wormhole

Sometimes the names I pin on these things get oddly specific. But in this case I feel it's not specific enough: The ocean is draining from it's original location to the side of the wormhole you can see in this image. It also appears to be rather polluted, but any society that uses wormholes to move oceans around is probably not going to be too fussed about that.

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