@WelshPixie Thanks! Im really happy with how it came out, am getting over my fear of committing to mixed-on-the-fly color strings.

@bea Thanks!

@migurski Thanks! Tipping my hand with the title but I'm thinking of a series.

@joshmillard Are you making the stencils with an xacto or using a vinyl cutter?

@migurski Vinyl cutter. I bought a Cricut machine late last year, and create vector shapes in Inkscape, import those .svgs into the (excellent) Cricut's (shitty) software, cut a vinyl stencil that way. Then pick out negative space, use mildly adhesive transfer material to transfer the vinyl to a canvas or board, and paint from there.

@migurski It's starting to feel like enough of a figured-out process that I should probably get my wife's help to document a painting start to finish.

@joshmillard Seems like you could go arbitrarily large with this.

@migurski In principle, yes. In practice, scaling up is a problem I still need to tackle. I can only cut stuff a foot wide with my Cricut; in theory it could be much longer than that, though my largest cutting mat is only 12x24.

So going bigger means piecewise stencils made of multiple parts, which again in theory no problem; in practice I currently have no good way of registering gross placement of the transferred stencil more accurately than 1/8". So neat, flush edges is a problem.

@migurski Using a less flimsy, less adhesive stencil approach is the likely solution, and I'm gonna try that -- instead of catastrophically fiddly material that I have to place just right the first time, use card stock with a mild adhesive spray and be able to reposition it a bunch if needed. But I might lose some of the really good tight seal I can get with the vinyl.

We'll see. I'm *excited* about going large with it, practical issues notwithstanding.

@migurski (I realize now you might mean arbitrarily large in reference to the fractal, rather than the stencil-size, heh. In which case, yes! I have gone larger in Inkscape and could go larger still. Practical issues of cutting/transferring/painting the resulting shape apply of course, see previous. But if I solve the practical problem, I'd love to do a deeper iteration.)

@joshmillard I think I meant both! I'm imagining one of these taller than a person, viewed at a distance. Seems like it would be very satisfying to walk up to it, walk away, and walk up to it again.

@migurski Yeah! I really really like the idea of work that scales with distance. Lots of classical and modern painting has a duality like that already, where there's the stand-back-and-see-the-whole aspect and the get-close-and-see-the-brush-strokes aspects, but really emphasizing that with the use of a fractal shape that keeps resolving would be extremely satisfying.

@joshmillard the big-ass hole in the middle makes it work from a distance.

@migurski @joshmillard Then you can do the scene where you get closer and closer to both the artwork and Cameron's face.