Who Goes There?

My first combination of Apophysis and Uru. The flame came first. It sat on my hard drive for well over a year before I did anything with it. When I saw it amongst the random batch, I just knew it was something special, just wasn't sure how. One day, while looking through some Uru screenshots, it suddenly hit me. Took some tweaking in PSP, and a re-render of the original flame (higher res), but I'm happy with the outcome. :) The title is from one of my favorite books, which later became one of my favorite horror movies, "The Thing".

Merging two art mediums

Two things I love to do the most, on my off-time, are making flame fractals and playing Myst Online:Uru Live. Creating flames is therapeutic, almost meditational, helping me to focus on an object or space. It helps me to move away from the stress, structure, and chaos of daily life...to a more open, slower-moving, almost fluidic thought process.

Uru Live parallels fractal art in many ways. It is not the typical FPS MMORPG. It can be intense though, and it does have its technological foobar moments. But, like fractals, it is a mostly relaxing and enjoyable escape from real life, especially when meeting friends online. I enjoy the beautiful, exotic and vast landscapes that Cyan feeds us every other week. It is a good experience to exercise one's senses, with wonderful sites and sound, and the familiar brain-crunching puzzles. I have all of the soundtracks from the Myst series, and have taken gigabytes of screenshots.

I am starting to experiment with combining fractals and Uru art. I tend to not create just for the sake of combining images, but instead wait to be presented with a compelling flame image, or a scene in Uru that needs the magic of an orb or flame.