Project Educate and Loonies

Hey there I promised to make a loonie every day from monday to today in the spirit of Project educate.
This journal is not really a tutorial but more an illustration of how you can use loonie in various ways as I tried to show in the last week submissions.
So lets get started

First up the one from Monday

This is the most easy one to make probably. Once you did the tutorial I made (and linked in the artist comment) you should be able to make this. Just to make a variation on the theme I used linear on the loonie to make room for the julian band (high power).

A less common way to use loonie is displayed int he fractal of Tuesday

It is used as a bubble by putting linear -1 , loonie 1 and some blur all on the same transform. I like these kind of bubbles and wonder why not many other people make them. So go ahead and try . Other then that this julian is very basic. the only thing different from the most basic julian is the filling and the usage of whorl linked on the julian.

Still simple but just a little more xaos is involved in

If you look closely you can see its just the regular loonie structure. Though it has cylinders in between them. By using splits you can make room for such cylinder. Since, for this kind of fractal, you really do not want overlap you should use the splits instead of just throwing in cylinders.


Maybe a bit forgotten fractal is the spiral. Spirals are relatively easy to make and, again, very basic.

Loonies can make your spiral less boring and spicen up the things a little.


The last one in the sequence is

This is an experimental fractal. You can guess whats beneath the loonie and the blurring I am not 100% content with it but I hope to learn from it.
And so should you so think about what could be better in this one and how can that be achieved?

I thought a lot about what I really wanted to say in this journal and what should be the main message. I came to the conclusion that on the one hand people should not avoid the "standard" things cause they can look nice and why not make them? Some ideas are very simple but that doesn't make them bad. If you want to make some simple fractals yourself pay attention to the following things:
-blurring
-colouring
-composition
-balancing (the xaos/weights).
These are things you should always pay attention to but since the structures are so simple it is more easy to excel at these points. every time i made a fractal this week I was done with the transforms, variation and xaos withing 5 min. All of the time is spend in the other points. I can blur faster now then i used to but when I started making loonies I would spend over an hour just to get the blurring right. Adding a little blur pre render it and see if its too much or too less. Same holds for colour speeds and weights. Of course sometimes you are lucky but do not count on it and be patient. If you do not see any improvement that would be a bad thing so you can ALWAYS contact me or any other person in the aposhack. Most of them can tell you how to work your way around.

Experiment and learn from it. Try to remember what worked really well and what didnt so you dont have to do the same experiment over and over again.  Often it is helpful to decide in advance if you want a structure without any overlap or just want to experiment and make it more abstract. In the first case try not to break it and if you do then try to get back to the unbroken point. If you experiment with the structure there are some rules that will almost never break it which are:
when using a linked xform use a linearly based one and use the shared linked xform thing. if you just bend the loonie and not the bubble it will misfit.
Linearly based xforms are: waves2, loonie, whorl, curl, mobius (in specific settings).
Spherical can sometimes work as well.
And loonie can very often be replace by whorl

Do not mix different things on a transform except for blurring. If you have a julian band as in the first submission and put linear on it as well it will break.

Make space for the things you want in. if you want an extra bubble make sure there is space to put it so you dont get overlap. making a hole for bubble can be done by adding spherical on a main xform but more smoothly by using crops (smartcrop or cicrlecrop or copn with high n).


As a last tip: Do whatever you think is fun to make

Finally some loonies use I like myself to motivate you to use loonie as well


and of other artist as well