Daily Archives: December 7, 2013

From Snowflakes to Fractals and Back Again…

Snowflake

I remember when the first couple of weeks of December were dominated by getting the family Christmas Cards out the door.  It was both a joy and a frustration, and it has now gone the way of the curly telephone cord.  But there are dear people of my acquaintance who don’t use computers or cell phones, and I can’t bear to isolate them, so I try to make an effort to at least print some holiday stationery and send off a note.  That, and having seen the movie “Frozen” over the weekend, was the inspiration for the following adventure with “snowflakes”.   I started out by fighting a piece of printer paper with my dull kitchen scissors until it slightly resembled a snowflake.  Then I traced the shape into my sketchbook, got crazy with some water colors and white china markers, and took photos:

Cut out and traced around

Watercolor edges

Watercolor edges

Looking like a doily!

Then I spent a couple of hours Off With the Photoshop Fairies, sectioning and slicing and dicing and duplicating … and in the end decided that I really liked the original plain painting better than the “fractalized” version, although it is pretty cool to warp them and make them look like they’re flying:

Snowflake Multiples

So that was last weekend, and lo and behold, we woke up to SNOW this morning, quite a treat for us down here in the valley.  And it just kept snowing all day!  Woohoo!  Which led first to a walk down to McManamin’s pub and lunch in front of their roaring fireplace, and then to a brief wander around the Internet reading about snowflakes and fractals and ice crystals – oh my, how little I know about so many things.  So much to learn and play with, so little time…