Fractal Printmaking

Hey fans. Welcome back to the award-winning Image of the Week series here on Orbit Trap — your one stop clearinghouse for all things fractal.

Today’s King for a Week is none other than the famous Mr. Velocipede, an artist of many mediums and styles of which Fractal Art is just one of them as you can see on his Flickr Photostream.

What caught my eye was his printmaking series where he has done some preliminary and experimental work printing fractals on an old-fashioned mechanical printing press.


Monoprint Background 2, by Mr. Velocipede, 2007

The printing medium, especially this sort of vintage method, really adds some style to what is normally a digital and squeaky clean process. Printmaking (and silkscreening too) never fail to capture my interest and when browsing photoshop filters I often look for ones that simulate the style of those mediums.

Mr. Velocipede has even attempted some new sort of printmaking thing, which I’m still not sure I understand, that involves laser toner and has a really wonderful gritty look to it. He explains a bit about it on his blog in this posting.


Paper Lithography #4, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008


Paper Lithography #1, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008


Paper Lithography #3, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008


Paper Lithography #2, by Mr. Velocipede, 2008

It was a relief to see that Mr. Velocipede’s Flickr site wasn’t inundated with the usual flood of self-serving and moronic comments. I took a screenshot of this one (below) because I thought it really summed up what makes Mr. Velocipede’s fractal prints interesting to me also. It’s a comment on the image, Paper Lithography #2, just above.

There’s a lot of other exciting things to check out there; some fractal and some not:
Bifurcus Speculorum
Gumball machine oracle
St. Francis of Assisi Kitty Litter Cathedral

All of the images of Mr. Velocipede’s here are covered by a Creative Commons license found here. The smart choice for internet-savvy artists.

Well there you have it. Join us again next week for Image of the Week here on Orbit Trap where we praise the positive and play football with the negative — either way it’s always a touch-down for our ever-faithful readers!

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One thought on “Fractal Printmaking

  1. Gee, I’m famous! Thanks for the publicity.

    I’m sure you’ll be sad to hear that I’ve just finished putting small copyright notices on the fractals in my newly redesigned gallery at polychroma.com. This being the internet, I fully expect them to get stolen and re-used anyway, and I don’t particularly mind that. I figure if my name is on them, at least somebody will know who to Google if they encounter an image somewhere other than my own site, and want to know what else I’ve done.

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