China Mauck
Boyd Monson
Project Statement (Final)

	In our project we will explore the interplay of foreground and background colors. The foreground will feature a fractal that resembles a plant, or a fractal-plant if you will. The fractal-plant will start out barren and blossom into a glorious and rich Fractal-Plant. Through this method, we will also be exploring the cyclical nature of plant growth and decay. 
	In the background, this cyclical theme will continue, as time figuratively progresses through night and day. Though we only see one image at a time, together, these 1000 images will represent cycles of growth and rebirth. We will show these themes through the use of warm and cool colors, and also through varying the brightness and value of the colors. To make our work visually appealing, we will balance the colors of the background and fractal-plant through the use of color harmony. 
	As fractal-plant evolves, the balance of the image will shift in favor of the ends of the fractal, where the lines of the fractal will be more concentrated, creating the illusion of blossoming. Fractal-plant begins to grow from the lower left corner, but as it grows, the visual weight leans rightward. We find that this imbalance generates a soothing effect for the viewer.

	To implement fractal-plant, we used turtle graphics coupled with numeric recursion to create the fractal, and image-compute-pixels! to create the background. We also changed the turtle's brush size and color. We will used turtles to draw the branches of the fractal. To create the branching effect, we recursively called the fractal-plant procedure on the original turtle and three clones of the turtle that have been turned slightly at different angles. We also changed the color of the fractal based on the current iteration of fractal-plant by using turtle-set-color! to  select a specific irgb color from a defined list of 11 colors for each n modulo 11. We modified our original plan to have the fractal color depend on n modulo 7 because we decided to use n modulo 7 to determine another aspect of our image. We set the brush to an appropriate size for the stem, and a slightly smaller size for the ends of the fractal.
	We used image-recompute! with a function that depends only on n and the row to create vertical color gradients and the illusion of a horizon line. We created a procedure, color-blend, that takes two colors, width, and height, and creates an image that is a smooth vertical blend from one color to the next. We created this background by choosing between seven color schemes that represent different times of the day. We modified our original plan to have 24 color schemes because we did not feel we could create 24 distinct vertical gradients. The color scheme selected is based off the value of n modulo 7 by the use of a cond statement.
	We change the size of fractal-plant, making it dependent on n modulo 3. We added this to our original plan to create a greater variety in our image series.
	To ensure that our procedure will produce 1000 distinct images, we used modulo to vary each component of the image—the fractal iteration, the fractal color, fractal size, and the background color scheme. The fractal iteration depends on n modulo 5. The fractal color depends on n modulo 11. The fractal size depends on n modulo 3. Finally, the background color scheme depends on n modulo 7. Since these four numbers are relatively prime in pairs, we know our algorithm will produce 3*5*7*11=1155 distinct images.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system (where we got the idea, for the fractal plant, and how to compute it)