Jumpstart Your Creativity with Geometric Fractals

For the past several years, I've toyed with the creation of geometric fractals, but most of my art still involves photography and digital art created from original nature photos. This week, however, I decided to add a few new fractal prints to my Etsy shop.

I've experimented with a couple of really good programs - Ultra Fractal and Apophysis, but today I played with one that I've used in the past for creating seamless tiles. Tiles are great for email backgrounds and web pages.  The deeper I delved into SeamlessMaker for Mac, the more I realized its fractal-building possibilities, as well. Beginning with an original digital art image, I was able to experiment with colors and design to my heart's content, eventually coaxing it into the floral image shown here.

A second image on my hard drive withstood a few minutes' worth of tweaks, and was transformed into this swirly tangerine art print. Not bad for starters, eh?

Sometimes it's not so much the results that thrill me, as the steps towards achieving something unique and totally unexpected.

American poet, lecturer, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson got it right when he said, "In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire." A creative spirit can run into roadblocks. Each of us probably remembers a time when we felt like our quota of inspiration had dwindled like a pocketful of loose change.

When ideas shrivel and there doesn't seem to be a creative horizon within view, try something different, such as experimenting with fractals. A little something extra is usually all it takes to jumpstart our creativity and get us back on track.

Happy Monday!
Bonnie