Even though I hate math… I love what can be created using geometric patterns. While there seems to be many different styles of art that fit under the umbrella name of a Fractal, what I found when I went looking for more information about them was a treasure trove of amazing art. Make sure to click the images below to see the entire fractals in all their wonder. Thanks to manekineko for starting the conversation in the forum that inspired this post.
A fractal is generally “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,”[1] a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” -Wikipedia
Approximate fractals are easily found in nature. These objects display self-similar structure over an extended, but finite, scale range. Examples include clouds, snow flakes, crystals, mountain ranges, lightning, river networks, cauliflower or broccoli, and systems of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels. Coastlines may be loosely considered fractal in nature. -Wikipedia
Feeling inspired? Ready to try making some fractals yourself? Here is a program to try out and some resources to help you make your own mathmaticaly awesome art.
Apophysis is a freeware Windows program for designing and rendering fractal flames. It was created by Mark Townsend and has since been improved and updated by Peter Sdobnov, Piotr Borys and Ronald Hordijk.
The Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest is continuing efforts to promote fractal and algorithmic art, they organized a new exhibition to coincide with the Year of Mathematics and Science. The contest is to select some of the artwork to be used in the exhibition.
What distinguishes fractal geometry within mathematics is an exceptional and uncanny characteristic. Its first steps are not tedious, hard, and unrewarding, but playful and extraordinarily easy, and provide rich reward in terms of stunning graphics. To the mathematician, they bring a bounty of very difficult conjectures that no one can solve. To the artist, they provide backbones around which imagination can play at will. To everyone, a few steps in about any direction bring extraordinary pleasure. Nothing is more serious than play. Let’s all play.
—Benoit Mandelbrot
The work of Chicago area based artist Vaeda Baty is full of dream inspired, softly colored and richly textured photographs.
Vaeda was nice enough to send us some of her work to share with COLOURlovers, so I asked her a few questions about life and work, and found out what exactly is going on in those inspiring dreams.
‘brotherly love, relief, and truth’
COLOURlovers: Tell me about yourself
Vaeda Baty: I am an independent photographer from the Chicago land area with a simple desire to communicate with the world through creation. I became interested in photography when I realized that everything I have come to know will one day disappear.
CL: Tell me about your work.
Vaeda: Much of my work explores the natural world. I attempt to understand the tension present in a life lived dialectically. Photography is a form of storytelling, and I am moved to be a part of the narrative.
’stained glass visionaries’
CL: What inspires you?
Vaeda: I am inspired the most by great people in my life, my loves. I am also constantly inspired by other artists and my dreams. The beauty of everyday moments and the reality of loss.
CL: What do you look for in your compositions?
Vaeda: They look for me! I will be out and about with my camera and something will draw me into a particular scene. I want to be able to tell a story about the subject. Interesting light is important as well.
’speculative’
CL: Are you attracted to certain colors more than others?
Vaeda: Blue is by far my most favorite color to work with. I am drawn to primary colors in general and often prefer to work with a monochromatic palette. I also love neutrals.
We thought it was time to check in on our most loved Palettes, Colors and Patterns making their way around the community at the moment.
With 108,705 members who have created 1,196,974 Colors, 431,454 Palettes and 133,971 Patterns, we needed a way to divide up all the colors into a manageable post, as to avoid creating an overwhelming color explosion that might lead to the mind collapse of some poor blog reader. So, we are doing it by color, of course. Here are 50 of the top Palettes, Colors and Patterns from the community, starting with RED.
2008 has been a great year for us so far. We reached several milestones like 1,000,000 named colors and 100,000 members and we received some pretty major recognition…
Thank you all for being a part of our community and for helping us grow as one of the best places to share some of your time online. We have more big ideas planned and look forward to ever increasing the amount of color love in the world.
16 June, 2008
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We love color lovers, especially when they love COLOURLovers, and extra especially when they integrate COLOURlovers into their love of spreading the love of color. Such as, our member wearpalettes.
There once was a blog named The Sartorialist who changed the way fashion was viewed and how trends were passed along from city to city, for the better, we hope, as we hope all things are for the better.
One day, a graphic designer by the name of Daniel thought it would be a good idea to archive the inspirational colors of the clothing that he was seeing. Daniel turned to The Sartorialist and their archive of photos to start his journey into the creation of wear palettes. Little did he know that such an idea, was such an idea. One that would touch the hearts of so many, simply with color.
This is the story of daniel and the blog wear palettes.
wear palettes is a blog for color and fashion inspiration. Drawing from the archives of street fashion photos from The Sartorialist, the blog has collected nearly 1600 different palettes, and allows you to search the archive using 22 different tags, if you are looking for color specific inspiration. The creator behind wear palettes is Daniel, a Swiss graphic design student who first had the idea of a clothing color database for one of his school projects.
I sat down with Daniel, at our respective computers located halfway across the world from eachother, to have an intimate chat about wear palettes, COLOURlovers, and fashion.
Daniel: It is a collection, a database of palettes taken from The Sartorialist street fashion pictures. It has almost 1600 units and I update it everyday. Also, the palettes are categorized by color and you can sort through the palettes for colors you are looking for.
As many of you know, it feels almost counterintuitive to use words to describe color. With endless possibilities of different shades and tones, one can seemingly only speak of primary colors and hope that the reader is creating the correct mixture in their head. As difficult as it may be to describe a specific color, describing the importance, and personal impact, of color all together is somewhat more of a manageable task, and many words have been said by all types of people who share a love for color, and recognize the impact it has on all of us.
We thought we would catch up on some of the top colors, palettes and patterns currently ciruclating through the community, and share some words about color from a few famous figures.
Top Palettes
Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. - Oscar Wilde
White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions. - Pablo Picasso
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint. - Pablo Picasso
Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity. - Rainer Maria Rilke
The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most. - John Ruskin
Here at COLOURlovers we love all of our members. Everyday we come across new colors, palettes and patterns that inspire us, and once in while we find a member who is working as hard; well, almost as hard, as us to spread the love of color on their own.
One member, fazai38, who has continued to impress the community also has his own blog that is an inspiration to us. Many of the post at blog.fazai38.com utilize the features of COLOURlovers using them to create incredible photo and palette color inspiration posts.
So, to keep spreading the love of our community we thought we would highlight some of his palettes to inspire those who haven’t come across his work or blog.
fazai38 is a multimedia designer and blogger who lives in Malaysia.
The Illustrations of Nastia and Palettes of fazai38
Nastia is a wonderful person who currently lives in Moscow, Russia, and she’s working as an illustrator and graphic designer because she sort of loves doing that. And, coming to think about it, that alone makes her quite a successful young lady if you ask me. Yes, I do know that nobody ever asks me, but the whole story about one doing what one loves and lives happy because of that actually does sound believable. So, here’s unexpected bit of free advice - “if you don’t like moving boxes, you shouldn’t be in the box-moving industry”. You just quit that and you’ll be as happy as she is, that’s for sure.
Anyway, we really should get back to her story. As you probably don’t know, since you had no way of finding that out, in the past she had changed some of occupations and places. She traveled around a lot, smiling politely and stating that “meeting people is easy” and “hey, now, that’s just zany!”. She studied graphic design in Moscow academy of prints and celebrated that by having a remarkably red hairdo for three consecutive years. Also, she worked for a whole bunch of different companies around the world, which were unusually happy while she was there with them and a lot less happy after she would leave. Oh, and she considers herself to be a tornado expert because she lived in Germany for couple of years and there’s nobody currently here to prevent her from claiming she’s a tornado expert.
Almost 4 years ago I had an idea and threw down some code that would allow people to share colors and rate them… Just a few days ago our 1,000,00th color was named and shared on the site. It was only 10 days ago, but since that milestone color was upload… another 32,000 have been shared. That’s some serious color love!
The names of colors can do funny things, just check the interesting coincidences thread for more examples… but _stefan, unknowing that the color he named Ego would in fact be our 1 million milestone color. Thank you all for sharing so much color love with us. (And now that the Color API is up and running, some creative folks are going to find some awesome ways to play with that color / name data.)
COLOURlovers Major Color Milestones
Every color on the site is special, but here are some extra special milestone colors.
You can browse the color archives all the way back to Dec. of 04 when we started COLOURlovers to see what the top colors were each month. Here are the top 2 colors from each of the last 12 months.
Teresa, Teri, Faded Jeans passed away April, 11th… She was a much loved part of our community and she will be greatly missed. A fellow COLOURlover and friend let me know the sad news and I felt it appropriate to let you all know… but, most importantly to share a little of the amazing color love that she left behind with us.
TERESA LIGHT
Germany- Teresa Lynne Light, 51, formerly of Kingsport passed away unexpectedly early Friday morning (April 11, 2008) in Attendorn, Germany.
She was born in Warner Robbins, Georgia and had lived the majority of her life in Kingsport until moving to Germany in 2003. Teresa was a graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School in 1975. She worked for the City of Kingsport from 1987 to 2003. She was a talented artist.
Mrs. Light is preceded in death by her mother, Betty Light and her sisters, Judith Smith & Vanessa Webb.
Teresa Light is survived by her husband, Dr. Nils Hoffmann; her daughter, Cara Webster & her husband, Barry; a brother, Steve Light.
A memorial service will be conducted on Saturday (May 3, 2008) at 2 p.m. at Carter-Trent Funeral Home, Kingsport with Ed Clevenger, minister officiating.
I believe in celebrating a life and what I will humbly attempt to do here is to celebrate the colors of her life that she shared with us. I did not have the pleasure of knowing her in the real world, but I appreciate her very much and feel so very honored and touched to have created a place for her to share her inspirations, passions and her heart… a place that will continue to share that and carry her love forward.
Do you have something interesting and colorful you want to share with over 600,000 lovers per month? We'd love to have you as a guest author, so send us an email with your tips or what you'd like to write about.
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