Year by Year 2000-2015 - Year 2003

2003 was a busy year in our family life, having lived in Glasgow for five years since the children were babies, we moved to our new home in England, new jobs, new schools, a new life in a small village, very different from the big city life of London and Glasgow we had been used to for so many years!



In what little spare time I had I continued the steep learning curve of fractal art - this is a small collection of fractals from 2003, all created using Ultra Fractal 3.

   


   

Looking at some of this work now, I can see that it could be construed as being somewhat rough and ready, with some being rather sickly-sweet; I have to try and resist the temptaion now to go back and rework them. They are what they are - representative of a developing skill using experimentation, exploration and a lot of help and interaction with friends.

Having said that, I think Schnapper is still one of my personal favourites!





   

   




I also had a tutorial about introducing texture into fractal art published in the magazine - I know I scanned it a while ago but now can't find it! When I do I'll upload it to DA. It is quite out-dated now as at that time there was no explore tool in UF, so the amount of texture had to be added and fine-tuned by manually typing in numbers. One of these days I'll getround to updating it for UF5 and will post that here, too.

Earlier journal entries in this series:

Year by Year 2000-2015 - Introduction
Over the next few months I intend to write a series of journal entries based on each year's creative work and how it came about, since 2000, when I started using Ultra Fractal.
So this is just an introduction, one of my personal favourites from each year - not necessarily the best either technically or artistically, but the ones that either mean the most to me, perhaps say something about me, or that I just like

I've created a Year by Year Gallery which includes the fave four from each year, plus sub-folders for the body of work for each year (a few years still to complete).
Click for: Year by Year Gallery
Slowly I'm going though my old folders, from Ultra Fractal v2.04 though to v5.04, re-rendering where necessary, to ensure proper representation - this is still very much a work in progress!
Click f  Year by Year 2000-2015 - Year 2000
We'd had a "Windows 3.1" computer at home since about 1993 for basic word processing, games and graphics. I seem to recall upgrading the hard drive from 8MB to 32Mb in about 1994 (yes - Megabytes, not Gigabytes or Terabytes!) and having to install Corel Draw from a set of 13 3.5" floppy disks. The last image alone I rendered in Ultra Fractal was 34.4MB, an impossible task in those days.
The late nineties and early noughties saw the internet gradually arriving in people's homes, including ours. Getting on-line in 1999 quite literally opened things up to a whole world of possibilities - something my children cannot really understand!
One of the things I came across early on when looking for a screensaver was Fractal Art, something I'd never even heard of before, let alone seen for real. For some reason I found it fascinating  Year by Year 2000-2015 - Year 2001
2001 represented a steep learning curve for me while continuing to work with Ultra Fractal. I had the good fortune to be able to beta test new formulas for several UF formula writers which forced me to get into the habit of exploring every parameter setting in the algorithms, something which continues to help me to really get the most out of the resulting fractal imagery.
One of the things I wanted most in my own work was to be able to incorporate interesting textures in to my work and constantly asked for a greater variety of parameters which would include texturing that was part of the fractal pattern itself, rather than just layering it on top of the fractal. The results of this are apparent in the works from that year.
Community activity that year included a fractal art contest, Ultra Fractal Contest 3, Creating a Series, Summer 2001 , hosted by Janet Parke infinite-art   Year by Year 2000-2015 - Year 2002
It seems like a strange thing to say now, but it took me quite some time to be able to create fractal spirals! Back in 2002, I used to eagerly await parameters posted to the Ultra Fractal mailing list by Peter Krysko and Mark Townsend, whose work often featured beautiful, big spiral patterns, often with a 3-D quality to them, but I remained mystified as to how on earth they had produced them.
   
So, when I finally twigged how to consistently create spirals I couldn't get enough of them, especially of the big, single variety! To an extent, since that time, those big spirals have become one of my hallmarks, and something that I have returned to time and again over the years.

I continued working with a small group of close friends, experimenting and beta-testing new Ultra Fractal formulas and sharing ideas, always pushing for more a