Brush or brain ?

One often compare the fractal program to the "brush" of the painter. I don't agree. It's much more (at least for me).

Look at the image above... There is a lot of small details that would be difficult to paint (on a canvas or in photoshop, for instance). And even if one manage to paint them actually, one would be stuck at a fixed resolution, while the "parameter" encoding in UF and other fractal generators allow to render images virtually at any resolution. This is what is usually considered as the advantages of fractal programs as "brushes" over more traditional brushes. They allow to produce big images with arbitrary precision.

But in fact there is much more than a "brush"... Look again at the image above... I didn't have the slightest idea about what would come out as finished image when I started. (Actually I even often start from a previous image and mutate it.) I could never have imagined this complicated pattern, nor could I have planned such a complex mix of colors. So the program is not just a convenient tool to render images, like a brush is a convenient tool to put paint on a canvas, it has a crucial role to play in the creation process. Speaking just for me to avoid hurting people, I'd even say that it's at the heart of the creation process, providing me with patterns and shapes that I try to combine in a tasteful way. And I've a whole folder of images with great patterns, that (probably because of insufficient artistic abilities) I was unable to cook properly. I think cooking is a good analogy, indeed.

Of course, one may say that these patterns do not come from nothing, someone wrote the code behind them. As in this case this someone was me, I can tell you what I had in mind when I wrote it. The image uses a big coloring, but only a small fraction of the code is actually used. This fraction corresponds to what is needed to draw a regular tiling with equilateral triangles, to superimpose such tilings of different sizes, and tweak them a bit (in some top secret way, of course). So more or less, here is what I had in mind when I wrote the code :

A little bit dull, isn't it ? With this plus some very basic operations, repeated a few times, combined by the computation power of a computer, you get this pattern on the final image. The computer somehow magnifies artistic intuition. It starts from a very stupid pattern and it turns it into something complex, unexpected, unpredictable.

So I can sum up the creative process in a caricatural way :
- Very simple and stupid pattern idea from me (and when I say "from me"... anybody could have thought to this...).
- Incredible complexification by the computer to produce something interesting and new (let me emphasize this "new"... it can produce patterns and shapes no one ever imagined, just because they are too complex or irregular).
- Cooking of the patterns and shapes by the artist. This step can fail easily...
- Rendering with arbitrary precision and details by the computer.

So really it's more than a brush... it's most of the artist's brain. :-D

(Ok, after I wrote all this, I uploaded my image... and noticed that all these "details" and "patterns" weren't so apparent at such a low resolution... so you'll have to believe me.)