A tree could be considered a natural fractal. The core principle is a line, repeated over and over, varied in length and direction.

In the 1970's, Benoit Mandelbrot developed a core principle that could be described as "juggling with two numbers, until a third number pops up". If the resulting number is taken as a color of a single pixel, and the process is repeated often enough, we get a 2-dimensional image.

The Julia set, based on formulas developed by French mathematician Gaston Julia in the early 20th century, is using a slightly different principle, resulting in different shapes.

With the new millennium, with faster computers and the latest software generation, fractals forms developed further into quaternion fractals. The core principle is based on the Julia system, however, the formulas no longer produce colors of pixels,
but surface points of a 4-dimensional object. This object itself, the whole 4-D form, cannot be displayed directly. Therefore a 3-D slice is taken from it, resulting in a 3-D virtual sculpture.

	Many quaternion fractals simply look like potatoes. It is my task to fish through an endless sea of possible forms, to find the ones with that special "touch", and to post-process them through scaling, rotation,
and with all kinds of textures. Finally, the sculptures are integrated into a suitable environment, or landscape. Today, this process requires high analytical efforts and programming skills. But within years to come, with more comfortable software and faster computers, fractal 3-D forms will become a standard element of art and design.

Further reading: for those interested in the deeper tech and math of it, simply google for "quaternion fractals", and you will find thousands of pages, images, and tools dealing with the fundamentals.