Enter the dragon

After all the fun I had making fractal snowflakes, I wanted to try out some different ideas with the “Transform Effect” in Illustrator.  Here I typed the word “Dragon,” and applied an effect that made three copies, rotated in multiples of 42º (I went for an arbitrary angle other than 60), and scaled up and shifted a little each time.

Applying the same effect again makes a kind of spiral, as you might imagine.


But because the rotations are done with respect to the bottom-left corner (rather than the center of the spiral), a strange pattern begins to emerge: 


Here I tried it again, with a transformation that makes one copy rotated 80º about the lower left corner, and shifted right.

We might expect to see four “dragon”s when the transformation is applied again, but one of them falls perfectly on the first copy so we see only three.

After the third iteration, the dragons have curled around enough to be farther left than the original, which moves the point of rotation.  Soon the fractal magic begins to occur.

Frozen fractals all around

Watching the movie Frozen with my kids the other day, I was happy to hear the term “frozen fractals” in the acclaimed song, “Let It Go.”  It made me look closer at the snowflakes and ice shapes depicted in the movie – but I didn’t notice much in the way of fractal structure there. 

The archetypical snowflake images tend to exhibit “branches on branches,” indicating fractal self-similarity, though the six-fold symmetry appears to be the defining characteristic of iconic snowflake shapes. 

I wondered about making my own fractal snowflakes using a simple iterative process…but I wanted something different than the Koch snowflake.

Starting with a random shape, I repeated the following process (in Adobe Illustrator, which made it easy):

Create 5 more copies, rotated in multiples of 60º about the lower left corner of the bounding box.

Here are the first four iterations:
  
After that my computer was slowing down, but you get the idea.  I tried the same idea again, but this time the copies were rotated about one vertex so they overlapped and ended up making a cool tile pattern: