For BrittandJosie's Christmas Ornaments Contest: Hive Ball 4, a Wreath Frost Ball!

This art is in response to Hive account@brittandjosie's Christmas Ornaments Contest, which you can find HERE!

Rings within rings within rings of goodwill, some easily seen, some not, all important, and with a heart of gold in the center of it all -- this ball is dedicated to Hive account@mariannewest and the Freewriters Community known collectively as Hive account@freewritehouse, that tight interlocking ring of writers in which I landed on Hive's predecessor, and in which I was nourished into the writer I am today!

For perspective: Hive account@mariannewest has kept up more than FIFTEEN HUNDRED daily five-minute prompts, the equivalent of doing something EVERY DAY FOR MORE THAN FOUR YEARS. She and the team also have kept up a variety of other kinds of freewrite opportunities -- Zapfic and Zapfic50, brought by Hive account@felt.buzz, Maynia by Hive account@kaelci in case November and National Novel Writing Month just isn't enough for you, the Weekend Writing Contest by Hive account@itsostylish most recently, and of course A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, run by Hive account@freewritehouse. Any length and type of writing -- you can learn how to do it, every day and every week, in the company of better writers than yourself that you can learn from and apply the lessons.

For me, this stretching of what was possible has made me the kind of writer who now can go out and find opportunity ANYWHERE -- I burst out into The Ink Well and Alien Art Hive (their ball is coming later) here, but also onto Amazon on two different sides, and am gearing up for other opportunities as well. The preparation happened in Freewriters -- if someday I am a rich writer, guess what? A lot of that will have to do with Freewriters Community here on Hive!

All right, so, how was this made -- as ever, I used Hive account@brittandjosie's form, which you can find on the original contest post:

Then I went into Apophysis 2.09 ... this was a different kind of challenge than most of the balls I have made, because a wreath is 2D. The other thing about Apophysis is that it makes its fractals with a HUGE palette -- 700 of them, and they can be subdivided to infinite degree. The point is, you're not going to just get green or gold or red -- not when the fractal figures have to be drawn in several million iterations PER SECOND. The distinctness of the shapes requires a higher level of color use ... and of course, there's no way to force a perfectly spherical wreath because it's a 2D shape and needs the suggestion of evergreen texture.

So, it took a while to get as close as possible ... in essence, I had to take the approach as if I was going to paint wreaths on the ball with a paintbrush that was going to repeat every move millions of times per second with different color choices ... I chose a white background to bring out the dark green, and so the center ring would be bright and the golden center would warm up that cold white spot left in the central wreath. On black this looks totally different, too dull ...

... so I sacrificed the solidity of the figure for brightness, and "frosted" the snowball white!