If there were such a terribly unscientific thing as an ‘ether’ in the first place (And you never know, physicists come up with any number of crazy ideas that they claim to be able to fit to mathematical models.
They probably can, but nobody but the other physicists would be able to tell if they were full of nonsense.), I think it would have various ethereal beasties living in it. Beasties that leave footprints. Some of these footprints would be very large. Some would be very small.
The beasties that leave large footprints would eat the beasties that leave small footprints. It’s only natural, after all. I submit for your consideration the image above, wherein we see footprints marking the passage of a Very Large Beastie chasing after various smaller beasties. The remarkable resemblance in color to rainbow sherbet is purely an artifact of our Etherscope, which must use false color to present interpretable images.
This flame achieved completion in a rather roundabout fashion. I started out with another flame, which got a distorting final transform applied to it. Then it got mutated while the final transform was in place. That got rendered (I’ll probably post it sometime in the next month), and while I was waiting for it to finish I decided to get rid of the distortion and see what happened to the piece.
That gave me the very interesting basic shape seen here, and with a few additional iterations and tweaks, it turned into this flame. I’m very glad I decided to keep messing around with it instead of going and playing minesweeper or something while I waited for the render to finish. This piece is much more interesting than the one I was working on initially. If you want to learn how to make fractal art, check out this post.
Layered Progression
This flame uses the same sort of trick as the ‘marble’ flames do: A final transform that maps the image onto a different shape. In this case, instead of using the bubble variation to make it a round shape, I used the ‘rings’ variation, which produced nifty concentric circles. I think it probably shuffled the order around just a little bit too so that parts of the flame that used to be nearer the center are now at the outside edges. To learn more about famous fractal artists, click here.
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 a 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.
Decorative Fountains
Right after I got my shiny new computer monitor I decided I needed some shiny new fractals to put on it, and this was one of them. It’s not my best work, and it’s not my worst, but it is shiny. The widescreen version is the one I ‘intended’ when I made the thing. It lacks the negative space at the top and bottom which you can see in the preview image and the 1280×1024 version. I’m torn as to which one I to take. Click here to learn how to make fractals.