Color and Fractals

28 min read

Deviation Actions

ChaosFissure's avatar
By
Published:
6.2K Views
:iconprojecteducate:
:iconprojecteducate:


Fractal Week


Fractals can be wondrous, colorful things.  Color in artwork can exude life and vibrant energy that is inspiring to view. It can provide soul behind an image that draws you into the canvas created by an artwork, and engages your attention through a powerful, emotional response to what you observe.  This article will be an amalgam of topics, covering utilization of color in fractals, some color theory, some examples, features, strategies regarding "color," and things to consider when choosing them.


If color is considered by viewing how "reds," "greens, "blues," and other tones interact and differ in artwork, then all the examples above are indeed colorful.  However, this quality certainly isn't necessary in fractals; it's possible to make interesting things utilizing monochromatic gradient schemes.

Porous Rock Formation by Mathness  Marble by OutsideFate

Even without "color," fractals can look amazing, and the textures and sense of depth they share can simply be stunning.  However, this places a burden on fractals utilizing color -- if colors are not necessary to share the structure or shape, then it goes to follow that both what colors are used, and how they are utilized, must be decisions that influence the quality of a piece of artwork.  Not only can these decisions enhance the shapes, motion, and textures present in fractals, highlighting interesting elements and making something interesting become something inspiring, but they can also do the reverse: making something amazing into something that isn't enjoyable to look at.

Take a look at the example below; a grayscale image (and gradient) showing the texture and shapes present:


Of course, of color can be introduced to this.


Suddenly, the bright areas can become burning flames, layers of smoke can be seen over the fire, and it glows in a dull way and fades out at the darker areas of the image.  Any shift seen in the gradient's luminance was minimal; hue and saturation are the only two areas modified.


Even though you can have something that looks interesting with a good gradient, it's not too hard to do the opposite with a poorly-coordinated gradient, causing it to seem messy and making it confusing to interpret. The demonstration above shows that understanding how colors interact with each other, and with the fractal, is important to understand.  In other words, it is a conscious decision, and "it needs colors" is not an excuse for neglecting to spend time and effort using them.

To make more sense of the benefits working with colors, we need to redefine "color" in a more concrete way - rather than considering them fuzzy groupings of hue, saturation, and luminance or value that fit tags like "red," "green," and so forth, let's add another function to color: light and shadows. Depending on the type of fractal you're creating, color can transform the fractal into something that seems entirely different with absolutely no changes to its structure! Color also has another important property:  the ability to serve not only as a material, but also functioning as light and darkness -- partially dictating luminance found in an image, and controlling depth and dimensionality.  For instance, all three fractals below are the exact same structure, utilize fixed hue and saturation, but contain various levels of value:


In 3D fractals, luminance typically results from light sources interacting with the fractal material. By strategically controlling how light and shadow manifests in a scene, it is possible to force attention to go to a certain part of the image, to highlight interesting things, and to have interesting material effects.  However, unless the fractal material itself is permitted to glow and diffuse light upon a scene, it is unable to directly influence how a sense of light or depth propagates through the image itself.


Fractals relying on gradients for color can directly manipulate hue, saturation, and value at will.  This not only permits, but actually forces the gradient to provide information regarding how "shading" of colors in the gradient occurs.  In Ultra Fractal, this can be accomplished in individual layers through the transitions between nodes of the gradient, and between layers through layer masking and layer properties to adjust contrast or color.


In Apophysis, gradients can be enhanced by modifying Brightness, which influences how "light" is applied to the fractal, and "gamma," which controls the impact of brightness by making the fractal body more or less opaque.


Ultimately, color is a tool to enhance artwork that you are working on. If you're looking for color schemes that seem realistic, are looking for your artwork to appeal to a wide audience, or are looking to create depth and texture that complements a fractal you're working on, then you understand that being picky about color schemes is a necessity.



I try to keep a few rules of thumb in use when I create gradients in my own artwork:

  1. Determine the theme.  It's easier to mentally associate themes with imagery, and then extract colors from the imagery.
  2. Pick the background colors first.  It's always important to know what colors need to fade into and out from.
  3. Pick a few highlight colors, and transition them to nearby hues with lower saturation that fades into the background.  If I want fire on a black background, I'll have a bright yellow, which fades to orange, dark red, and eventually dark gray or black.
  4. Add non-saturated, "natural" elements.  These elements are meant to provide detail in texture, but not serve as focal points or vie for power against the highlight colors that I picked.  Typically, these include golds and sand colors, metallic grays and desaturated blues, dark and desaturated greens, and browns or rust, depending on what type of theme I have picked.  These should not be "flat" colors -- shifting between lower and higher value of any given "neutral" tone will add points of interest that open up more potential for what the gradient can accomplish.
  5. From here, I look at the gradient as a whole and shift around how the highlights and elements are spread out, and try to ensure that the gradient covers all the colors I want and doesn't contain transition tones that seem out of place.  Additionally, I try to make sure that the background does not been replaced by the neutral tones, and try to re-introduce it if it has disappeared.
   
So, what makes a color scheme bad?  Although this is a highly subjective topic, there are some generic signs that can indicate if a color scheme might be aesthetically pleasing to an average individual.  If you haven't read Fractal Rendering and Presentation yet, I'd suggest that you take a look at it at some point, however I will reiterate what is mentioned there.

  1. Color combinations that have too high value make it hard to differentiate between colors, and make the whole image very bright.  It is a strain on the eyes to try to pull difference in ultra-high key color combinations, especially if there are no dark areas that can provide contrast to them.
  2. Color schemes that are too dark make it straining on the eyes to view.  Typically, introducing more luminous colors can resolve this.
  3. Color combinations that contain too many strongly saturated colors that spread across the color tend to be hard to look at.  This, for the most part, means rainbows of color -- unless you have a diffusion of color via lower value / saturation of the rainbowed hues, or transition that visually diffuses combinations of colors and shapes in a fractal, it will appear incredibly busy, stressful, and perhaps just unappealing in general.
  4. Random Generation of gradients or colors tends to be awful.  Random number generators have no idea what looks good or not, and it's hard to write a program that can generate appealing color schemes with regularity.  It is much easier to come up with color schemes that look good, and deal with randomizing known, good color schemes than it is to randomly generate one.  If you don't want to spend time making your own color schemes, which is more than worth the time spent doing so in the long run, at least use premade ones rather than randomly generated ones.
  5. Failure to diffuse strong colors makes the image stressful to observe.  Rainbow or not, any strongly saturated tones work best when they're not next to each other in jarring ways.  This means that transitions to a strong color need to be built up to on both sides, and shows significance to the importance of neutral and background colors.
  6. Failure to desaturate and/or darken tones means that all of the tones vie for power among themselves.  That makes it hard to know what to focus on when looking at an image, because everything will be popping out.
  7. Color schemes meant to be "trippy" ... are just that. That generally is not a good thing, because such color schemes usually can be identified by their conformance to some of the points above for the most part.


Those issues above are major symptoms of color schemes that likely will not work.  However, there are also more subtle indicators that can be used as metrics to refine color schemes that appear to address the symptoms above:

  1. Maintaining a natural balance of tone is important.  If you're building a fantasy environment, there has to be some way to differentiate the extraordinary from the ordinary.  Even if you have a good combination of colors, are they utilized in a ratio consistent to how they would naturally appear?
  2. If you're representing something extraordinary (like a flame, or massive wall of fire), does it appear to flow naturally?  Is there darkness to it that shows that it's a transparent material?  Is there smoke?  Do any textures appear to look interesting and engaging?


Comments20
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
AnnaKirsten's avatar
Excellent article!