October 2020 – Mathaesthetics

MathPaint public beta drops this week! + some fractal wallpapers

October 30, 2020October 30, 2020 by Christopher Corbell

MathPaint is a new generative graphics app for Mac. With MathPaint you can create amazing art using and mixing different models, from geometry to function plots to fractals to noise. You don’t need to be a programmer or mathematician; it’s built using familiar graphic-design software metaphors (layers, effects, settings), with awesome online help for every control and option.

We’re thrilled to announce a free public beta of MathPaint 1.0 starting in the coming week! Sign up on the MathPaint mailing list and we’ll send you a message when the beta is available:

Sign up: MathPaint News and Tips

Meanwhile, here are a couple of 4k fractal wallpapers I made with MathPaint while testing this week…

Fractal Friday 2020.10.23 – three warped Julia Sets

October 23, 2020 by Christopher Corbell

Made with MathPaint, here are three Julia Set images warped by an additional real-valued function and with some custom color mapping. The third image, using assigned color bands instead of gradients, also includes some Perlin noise mixed in. Enjoy! Sign up to the MathPaint News and Tips list for information on the upcoming MathPaint release and … Read moreFractal Friday 2020.10.23 – three warped Julia Sets

Fractal Friday 2020.10.16 – Julia Set variations with 5+ colors

October 16, 2020October 16, 2020 by Christopher Corbell

Images made with MathPaint, using the Variations feature to generate different possibilities. I made an improvement this week – the variations random-selection code will now also vary the assigned value of colors (as well as altering colors themselves, and fractal parameters like C and breakout value).

Enjoy! You can sign up on the MathPaint mailing list to get Fractal Friday and MathPaint art and announcements in your in-box.

Fractal Friday 2020.10.09 – Julia-set contour variations

October 10, 2020October 10, 2020 by Christopher Corbell

Fractal Friday is back! With the public beta of MathPaint very close, I’ll be sharing more art created in testing. This week’s supply comes from the Variations feature (along the same line as the recent Tiled Polar Variations post). In this case we start with a Julia Set fractal drawn in edge-contour mode, and generate several variations, keeping the ones we like. Enjoy!

Tiled Polar Variations (23 rapidly-generated images)

October 3, 2020October 3, 2020 by Christopher Corbell

Tonight I tested out both the new MathPaint Image Builder Wizard and the Variations window to quickly generate these images. The underlying model is a polar graph with a zoom-repeater applied and a CoreImage twelvefold-tiling feature. The first image was really easy to create playing with the Image Builder – I’m very excited to get it out with the next beta! The variations are created instantly, 8 at a time, in the Variations window – I found about 1 or 2 of each auto-generated batch aesthetically appealing. (I am expecting some day to hook up some machine learning to this feature so you can teach MathPaint about your aesthetic preferences – but for now it’s just cleverly randomized).

Here are all 23 generated images – enjoy!

generative art image