^ Speaking of which... I've been doing a lot of research and experimenting with fractal flames, as I intend on using them in my next series of drawings. This is one I rendered at maximum resolution (3441 x 2048) in Apophysis (I had to resize it to get it to fit on imageshack -- I'm currently using a variation of it as my background).
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/2513/thatchve2.th.jpg) (
http://img253.imageshack.us/my.php?image=thatchve2.jpg)
Fractal flames are truly amazing, I wish I had a better understanding of how to create them. It's very complicated, I'm used to just rendering random flames in GIMP, but there IS a science behind it and the program that you want to use if you're interested in it is Apophysis (
http://www.apophysis.org/), the one I mentioned before. If you're interested, check it out, it's really cool. The flame I posted above is the first one I pretty much did from scratch... or the closest thing to "from scratch" that I can achieve. I think it looks pretty good. :D