There's a wonderful program called Apophysis 7x that let's you make some really neat images with fractal flames.
Before I show the pictures, let me explain what a fractal flame is. It's a member of the iterated function system, which is a method of constructing fractals. They are comprised of many possible geometric shapes, commonly called variations in the fractal community. It was created by Scott Davis in 1992. His open-source code was ported into Adobe After Effects software, and then translated into Apophysis fractal flame editor. According to Fractal Architect, they are rooted in pure mathematics, but you don't need to understand that theory to create beautiful images. If you want to learn more about it, you can click here, but a warning: it's quite mathematically intensive.
There are some pretty amazing things that you can make in Apophysis, but it does take a lot of work to get the results. After some help from different communities though, I was finally able to produce some awesome stuff. Here's what I made, and some variations!
They also can take a massive time to render, especially if I zoom in. The last one took over a day to finish because I had to zoom so close!
I'm selling some products with these images on them over at my Illustrative Design store at Zazzle. So far only items with the first design are available, but I will be adding the others over time. Be warned that the first design does run a bit dark!
Please let me know in the comments what you think!
(All images in this post are copyrighted to me. Please do not use without permission!)