The enjoyment of fractals is not only in viewing but in creation. Although it is often pleasant to view the work of others, there is no match to the thrill of creating your own masterpiece, the adventure of delving into an infinitely complex world, where each click of the mouse yields another stunning creation.

There are many fractal programs that can be found on the internet. If you'd like to download these, you can always visit World of Fractals and visit the downloads section. This tutorial is meant to give the novice fractal creator a crash-course in building fractals using Ultra Fractal, one of the most user-friendly yet powerful fractal interfaces on the internet. Although this program is shareware, with a price of over $30, you can use the 30-day evaluation to decide if it is worth this price.

To get started, click here to download Ultra Fractal. Once Ultra Fractal has finished downloading, click on the program to install it. The installation procedure is quite simple. At the end, go into the start menu and open Ultra Fractals.

To begin, you should start experimenting with some of the basic functions. hold the mouse down on an area of the fractal you see on your screen (a Mandelbrot), and drag to zoom in. To zoom out, just pull the square until it's bigger than the screen. To rotate the screen, hold down the Alt key while clicking and dragging the mouse. Hold down the Ctrl key while dragging to pan.

Next, you should learn about gradients. Once you have zoomed into an interesting picture, click on the button on the top of the screen that has a box with different colours in it. This is the gradient controls. You can adjust the gradients by moving the control points to different colours and different spots. By pressing the + button at the top, you can add another control point. Basically, the line created tells the computer which colour to use for each amount of iterations. It is as if the computer has an uncolored color-by-number board, and you are telling it which numbers correspond to which color.

Maybe you don't like this fractal. You can go to a totally different one by going into File -> New -> Fractal. Then, just click on the formula folder and pick any one of the formulas to make a fractal. For further editing capabilities, go to the layer properties window, where you can tweak many of the settings. One of the best things to do is go to the Outside tab, and click the ... button. Then pick a coloring pattern from the formulas. This is awesome!

If you really want to make pictures with lots of depth, go to the fractal window, and click on the layers tab. Click on the copy layer button, and then the paste layer button. Now you have 2 identical layers. Next, alter some of the layer properties or coloring schemes in one layer, and then set the opacity around 50%. Play around with the merge modes a bit to see which you like best. This is a little more complicated than the rest, so you'll have to spend a little time. Good luck!

If you are having trouble making really nice pictures, you can always check out the parameters by pressing Ctrl-B, and opening the parameters folder. These are awesome pre-made pictures which you can play around with to make your own unique art.

This is just a brief overview and tutorial, so if you'd like to learn more, and get a more in-depth look into all the features of Ultra Fractal, just read the tutorial.

On the other hand, if you can't download Ultra Fractal, or just don't want to waste the time, you can do a little bit of limited exploring using the Mandelbrot Explorer, an online Java applet that lets you do some fractal exploration online.

All images Copyright Adam Lerer © 2000-2001

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