As with Nature's Basket, this one was created because of my urge to be able to pull off even a tiny bit of the amazing stuff =MichaelFaber can do with fractals. This time it took a little more work than just stumbling upon a good fractal, and so I'm more please with it than with any of my other fractals. Once I found something interesting, I decided to experiment a little bit, and I'm glad I did. I ended up editing the vars section to add in an extra variation to the one I was already using.

It turned out quite well, but with a catch. As always, I searched for the fractal by using a gradient blurred to the point of being only one color. I just happened to use a gradient that came out as a medium-darkish purple when fully blurred, and that may have helped in my recognizing this as a gem. The image looked perfect, although kind of dark, with the single color. But when I tried out other gradients it just didn't come out quite right, even when blurring them fully. It showed too many bright specks all around, making it look uglier, or was so dark it covered up some of the things that made it beautiful. So I pulled it into Paint Shop Pro 7 to colorize it. Today though I tried once more working with the gradients, and have found one even more satisfying than a recolor. Still blurring it down to nearly one color, but adjusting the saturation with the perfect gradient seems to have solved the problem.

Anyways, while screwing around with the colorizing a few days ago I tried out a negative and got this. To me it looks like living tissue under a microscope, so I decided to keep it. As for the original this is based off, now that I found a satisfying gradient I need to re-render it, which at the size I am doing it at will take about an hour and a half. So that will have to wait until I won't be using my computer for that long. Probably when I go to the laundry mat in a little bit. Afterwards I will upload it. Anyways, enjoy

Made in Apophysis 2.02, negative done in Paint Shop Pro 7.
This fractal is © myself, Kevin Richards.

Submitted June of 2006