Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hello my name is Sophie. I'm from Ireland and I'm a visual artist.

At the moment I'm very interested in fractal imagery, (not the computer generated stuff) just plain minimal simplistic hand drawn fractal images. I'm awful at mathematics. Really awful. I neglected that side of my brain somewhat! But I am fascinated by numbers, puzzles etc.

I was wondering if anyone could offer up a very simplistic mathematical method to create my own fractal. I've been reading up on all the great pioneers such as Mandlebrot, Koch etc.

I am mostly concerned with indefinite outcomes, patterns. Chaos, chance. But I would like to begin my own experiments. I'm very interested in the leaking faucet experiment, as the patterns created are irregular. Would it be possible to create a fractal of something irregular like the pattern smoke forms when exhaled?

Basically if anyone can vaguely understand or is interested in my nonsense, it would be of great help to me to discuss my musings with you,

Sorry that I am so inarticulate today,

I promise I will sleep tonight. :)

There are a number of fractal like approaches to get some things like that (the "fractal landscape" is a fairly simple one to start with).  To model something like smoke, you'd want to learn all about Navier-Stokes, but to quote wiki "can be extremely complicated and difficult to solve".

If I were you, I'd investigate cellular automatons, which, while not a fractal as such, does have some very interesting chaotic emergent behavior, and can create some very interesting irregular patterns.  The current issue of Make has an article about CAPow (http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/capow/index.html) which might be a good starting point...

Hi Sophie, welcome to the forums.  :)  Did you say hand drawn?  ???

Care to share one with us?

Hi Sophie and welcome to the forum.

To produce smoke-like patterns there are two main fractal types, one has already been mentioned i.e. landscape/plasma fractals also known as fractional Brownian motion or fBm for short. The other type that can produce smoke-like results are flame fractals.
For fBm/plasma fractals you can produce those in Fractint if you want freeware or Ultrafractal otherwise.
For flame fractals you can use Apophysis which is freeware.

To produce fractal patterns using a "real-world" method then one old-fashioned method is tie-dye :)

thanks so much for getting back to me fellas! Thanks for the tip gandreas, I'm looking into it now. I've just bought some quite a large graph book so I'll be up for the rest of the night drawing some fractals. I'll post one up when it's done! Thanks David, I'm not really interested in the computer generated patterns or programs, nor smoke patterns as a visual, what I meant to say was is there a certain mathematical method for calculating such random patterns? Like if I wanted to create a fractal of a cloud, but not so that the fractal looks like a cloud, it's just certain information about the cloud that translates into an interesting fractal....I'm confusing myself now! like when mandlebrot created a fractal to represent cotton prices. or flipping a coin, a swinging pendulum etc. But thanks so much, this site is great!

Sophie.

Greetings, and Welcome to this particular Forum !!     :)

If you have already created any hand drawn fractal images, I sure would be interested in seeing what you have produced.  If you are still in the process of learning, then when you do get some images, please consider this site to display them.