For those of you who are more familiar with my gothic and surrealist images it may come as a surprise that I also spend a fair bit of time working on "non-figurative" images. In some ways I find that creating these images helps purify the compositional sense (I don't want to launch into a Clement Greenberg debate here on the nature of a "virtual object"). "Anubis" is the result of dozens of hours of flame fractal tweaking (not counting the fairly long final rendering time). The original is at a much higher resolution. Production Notes This image was created using Ultra-Fractal 3 software. There are half-a-dozen layers of "flame fractals" with multiple gradient maps. Each "flame fractal" was created using Mark Townsend's Apophysis program. This very cool program allows the artist to quickly create hundreds of fractals in minutes and then begin the first stage of manipulating the most artistically interesting fractals into constructs that can be exported to Ultra Fractal. For those wanting to explore the technical details a bit deeper, these "flame fractals" were generated according to the Flame Coloring Method originally pioneered by Scott Draves in 1994. Draves work on modified IFS (Iterated Finction System) algorithms has opened up many artistic possibilities for which I am truly grateful.