Kid’s Fractal Art Studio

How to use the fractal art tool

Explore

Our fractal art tool allows you to explore six types of fractals: Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Mandelbrot, Tricorn, and Phoenix.

From the main page, you can select the fractal, change colors in ten background color palettes, and adjust the iteration slider for more or less detail. To zoom in, mouse click and shift click to zoom out. On mobile, pinch to zoom in.

Cut Out your fractal shapes

When you are happy with your fractal’s appearance, click on Cut Out in the top right corner, and you will be taken to a new screen.

On this screen, you can select the shapes you want to cut out, and the colors can still be changed. The shapes available are fish scale, circle, hexagon, star, leaf, diamond, heart, teardrop, petal, and crescent. Each shape can be reduced and enlarged in size, as well as tilted. If you prefer to make your own shape, you can freehand a shape.

Assemble

When you are done, click on Assemble on the right-hand side, and all your pieces will be waiting there for you on the next screen.

On this screen, you can work with each piece as you select it. Each piece can be rotated, scaled, adjusted in opacity, flipped, duplicated, and deleted individually. You can also change the canvas background.

When you are done, you can export them as a PNG or transparent PNG.

A simple look at fractals

Fractals are figures that repeat self-similar copies of themselves forever. We label them as having infinite iteration or recursion (this means if you look at the edge of a fractal, you will see the same image written smaller, and that edge will also have a smaller version, and so on).

You could spend a lifetime looking at smaller and smaller images and never come to an end. Indeed, you could go on forever, and there would never be an end.

This is all done mathematically, the same equation over and over. Fractal figures are a visual way of showing this mathematical computation. The mathematical field of study is called fractal geometry.

In fractal math, we are graphing something more complicated than simple (X, Y) coordinates; instead, we are graphing imaginary numbers. This is one of the reasons fractals look the way that they do.

Imaginary numbers cannot be put on the typical (X, Y) graph; instead, they are considered the square root of a negative number. This would not work with regular numbers, because any negative number multiplied by itself is positive. Since that is impossible in our normal world, mathematicians made up a new concept. They labeled their new number i, the imaginary number, and since it will not fit on a regular number line, they put it on another line at a right angle to the regular line. Those two lines make a grid, and that is where fractals are graphed; their points are made up of one real number and one imaginary number. This is called a complex number.

Whew! What does that mean?

In practical terms, it means that we can graph and explain many natural forms. Much of the natural world conforms to fractal geometry because, as it turns out, fractals are an efficient way to pack a lot of surface area into a small space, which is why lungs and trees use branching patterns.

Nature rewards efficiency. Creating shapes takes energy, and the shapes that are the most efficient and easy to make will continue to be made. We can see this in flowers, romanesco broccoli and ferns. In systems that are natural but not living, change follows the path of least resistance. We see this with fractals in lightning, river meanders, and maybe even galaxies.

Fractals are also beautiful, and in that, we have a page that allows you to explore six types of fractals: Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Multibrot, Tricorn, and Phoenix. These are six well-known fractal types.