Chris's green fractal

Chris, the lead singer of Gaia Consort, had been working on the song The Green when I was first starting to make sheep. He saw my screen capture of sheep 17746 on my mandalas page. He wanted to use the green fire as lighting for his spring concert. I figured we needed to re-render the sheep at more than 72 dpi, so I found the parameters for the sheep... but I couldn't help but think it would be better if we recolored it...

Vitus Dance fractal

... and then I decided to just Photoshop it a little bit... so of course, by the time I was done messing with it, it looked rather different from the original.

Vitus Dance cover

But Chris liked what I had done with it so much that he decided to use it as the backdrop for the cover of the new album! So, now it's famous. Sue used a version of the Ravens fractal (see below) for a couple of the booklet pictures too. The album is fabulous - I couldn't be happier!

Jeweled Cyclone
The cyclone part of the name comes from the motion of the sheep. Lots of these sheep I think would actually look better if the motion were slower, but this one does make a nice sort of whirling dervish.

Nieuwemarkt
Last year I happened to be in the US on July 4th, in England on Guy Fawkes day, and in Amsterdam on New Year's. On New Year's we walked up to the Nieuwemarkt, on the south edge of the Asian district, to watch the locals take turns blowing up massive quantities of colorful small explosives.

The Careless Color of Sea Foam
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. - Peter S. Beagle

Shiva's Third Eye
Having seen some of the really amazing edges that the server has produced lately, it seemed that it was using some kind of intelligence to make edges out of related sheep. So I decided to upload a group of related sheep and see if it would make edges between them. It didn't. But it made for some good sheep in the process. The sky-blue color and mandala-like aspects of this one led to the name.

Quetzalcoatl
I guess there's just something about this group of fractals that makes me think of exotic gods. Actually, I was thinking of things which are iridescent - Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec god: a name that means feathered serpant. The god was pictured as having the long iridescent feathers of the quetzal bird.

Gallic Moor
This one makes me think of things Celtic and green.

Wind in the Sails
One of two attempts to get some more interesting action inside the circles.

Fourty Lashes with a Fish
A second attempt at the same thing. This one succeeded in getting better motion inside the circles, but the circles don't move any more. Such is life. Oddly, this one is now my top-ranking sheep, with a peak score of 42. I will never understand taste.

Bright Angel Trail
Bright Angel Trail is a trail in the Grand Canyon. The colors reminded me of the colors of the canyon in spring, when we were there. Really, the canyon is a lot heavier on the reds and browns with just small touches of green, but you notice them more for their scarcity.

Green Dandilion
First experiment with the mutate function. This is a mutation of sheep 87202. It's not actually all that different, but I liked the mandala-like center, and recoloring definitely brings out some different aspects of it.

Sun Factory
The result of back-crossing Sunspots with one of its parents, sheep 88287. I wanted to get some of the motion of 88287 along with the gear-like motion. This is the closest I've managed to get so far. To me it looks like gears pulling in firey spheres, thus the name. (Astronomical sun factories are nebulas, but you could name almost any fractal flame Nebula. Or Amoeba. Or Rorschach.) Interestingly, further back-crosses resulted in almost NO change to the appearence of the fractal. It produced about 2/3 fractals that looked like this one, and about 1/3 fractals that looked like 88287. I still don't understand that one.

Cat's Cradle
I really liked sheep 90216. But I think that it would be even better with more linear transformation - this is the closest I've got so far, but there are more in the works. The last Edge in the list is a morph into Sun Factory.

Ravens
I was very disappointed to see that the sheep loop puts almost NO motion into this fractal. I decided to post it anyway. It has good genes.

Duke Crescent
I just kept the name of the color palette for this one. The color was taken from a photograph of Crescent Lake, mixed up with some of the deep blues and purples from the Royal palette. It's not exactly royal... thus it's a Duke.
The last Edge is a morph into the next sheep, Sunspots.

Sunspots
No, its not your imagination, this is the same file with a different palette. I spent a while deliberating on which one to upload, and decided on both, and figured I'd see which one won the popularity contest. As it turned out, this one ended up with a higher rating quickly, but then didn't get many votes after that and so died after just a few days. Duke Crescent got a steady stream of votes over several days, but the total never got up very high. In the end that means that Sunspots will donate more genes to the pool.

Trying to work out if the server would accept an interpolated .flame file. Turns out the answer is yes.

Flange
A cross between icequeen and sheep number 87202.

Scarlet Macaw
I really like this one. So far it's at the bottom of the heap as far as the popularity contest goes. So much for public taste.

Ice Queen
So far, this one's winning the popularity contest among my sheep.

17MantidEyes
This one is a cross between icequeen and sheep number 1986 from the server.
The 17 in the name just refers to it being the 17th child of this cross.

Same cross, very different look.

Galaxies at Carnival

Lion in Autumn

My first sheep, Rose.