This one was a struggle... but worth it...
This is a sixth in a series of posts in which I am artistically exploring the way fractal geometry under lie a lot of the things we see in the world and thus can be reproduced using the iterative principles in fractal art.
As a review … a paintbrush stroke is the iteration of a line... a single stroke creates a broad line made of the merging of multiple lines that are very similar, and also creates a texture to the stroke that cannot be gotten by a single line.
I think of working in Apophysis as having a million hands and a million paintbrushes to work with, and also the ability to twist the canvas in different shapes.
The problem, of course, is that a single “stroke” mistake is iterated millions of times – easy to get lost and turned around and not be able to find one's way back to where you were. Even the “undo” button can only do so much!
Thus, this was where we began in Apophysis for a long journey to where I wanted to go …
Had to tighten that up a bit....
And a bit more ... you can begin to see now where we are going..
But that was where the fun started, around and around … a lot of my way of working is the interplay of straight lines and dense polygons with convex and concave curvatures, because nature itself employs more curves than hard corners. In that sense, a flower and a set of ripples in water are both built out of concentric circles, with the flower being a more complex thing, going through analogies with other round shapes in its development.
However, if combinations don't work in Apophysis, what's on your screen literally gets blown to points of pixels … basically you get left with a pile of dust. That happened a lot. The math didn't work on layering the iterations around the different canvas shapes at hand. It took a lot of time before I could fold up the whole thing into this “bud” …
… and after several more efforts, I thought of opening the bud by “twisting the canvas” in two opposite directions at the same time, and indeed, it opened in perfect symmetry to the shape you see!
