About the Artist

Winter is first and foremost a wife, and mother of three precocious children. Winter has the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom, and truly enjoys the chance this gives her to grow up with her kids. However, one must maintain one's sanity, and after cycling through various unfulfilling hobbies, Winter stumbled onto the joy that is Fractal Art.

Originally introduced to fractals by her husband (who happens to be an aerospace engineer and computer whiz), Winter dismissed them as "fun but much too difficult". Winter has always been vaguely confused by mathematics and has never considered herself much of an artist, either. However, after being persuaded by a friend to post her nature photography at deviantART in the spring of 2006, Winter discovered that fractals could be generated by using software that handles the complicated mathematical component. Intrigued and excited, Winter began teaching herself how to create fractal flame art both through experimentation and the help of tutorials made by generous fractal artists at the deviantART community. Winter still doesn't feel like much of a mathematician, but has been thrilled to discover that she is, indeed, an artist.

About the Art

So what exactly is a fractal, you ask? A fractal is a geometric pattern that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are pretty much self-similar (parts look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look about the same, no matter how far you zoom in). The specific subset of fractals Winter makes is the fractal flame, from the iterated function system class of fractals.

Winter has played with many great fractal programs, but the art you'll see in the galleries here was all made with Apophysis. Apophysis is a free, open source fractal flame editor and renderer for Microsoft Windows. It was created by Mark Townsend and has since been improved and updated by Peter Sdobnov, Piotr Borys, Susan Chambless and Ronald Hordijk (the Sourceforge project developers).

Fractal Flames were originally developed in 1992 by Scott Draves.

Some of the fractal flame info found at Wikipedia.

Winter, known offline as Natalie Kelsey

About the Webmaster

Farlander is a mad scientist devoted to the cause of debunking junk science wherever it is found. He is a mysterious man of many talents and interests, from building websites to microbiology, from digital painting and drawing to writing articles for H2G2. The art and words on this website may all be Winter's, but the layouts, design, and implementation were all the tireless (and much appreciated) work of Farlander. Cheers.