Fractal art is created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, music, or other media. Fractal art is usually created indirectly with the assistance of fractal-generating software, iterating through three phases: setting parameters of appropriate fractal software, executing the possibly lengthy calculation and evaluating the product. In some cases, other graphics programs are used to further modify the images produced. This is called post-processing.

Techniques

Fractals of all four kinds have been used as the basis for digital art and animation. Starting with 2-dimensional details of fractals, such as the Mandelbrot Set, fractals have found artistic application in fields as varied as texture generation, plant growth simulation and landscape generation.

Fractals are sometimes combined with human-assisted evolutionary algorithms, either by iteratively choosing good-looking specimens in a set of random variations of a fractal artwork and producing new variations, to avoid dealing with cumbersome or unpredictable parameters, or collectively, like in the Electric Sheep project, where people use fractal flames rendered with distributed computing as their screensaver and "rate" the flame they are viewing, influencing the server, which reduces the traits of the undesirables, and increases those of the desirables to produce a computer-generated, community-created piece of art.