Did you ever have one of those days ... ?

Did you ever have one of those days when your head is full of what feels like Big-Thoughts-That-Need-to-Get-Out, but those thoughts are broken up like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and they're all over the place, and you can't find any of the corner pieces so you can even know where to start putting them together?

Um, yeah. Me, too.

[Poll #1381401]

Instead of doing something useful, I spent a couple of hours playing around in MSPaint.

MSPaint has a curious quirk.

The normal bit is that when you click "Save as" and choose the .jpg format, the computer does some dithering to reduce the contrast in your image. That's normal -- that happens with the .jpg format.

The curious bit is, that once an image is in that format, it won't dither again, as long as only click "Save," but if you click "Save as" again, the MSPaint with dither over its previous ditherings, and you get whole new colors that didn't exist before.

So tonight, I deliberately played around with that. I made a custom shade of greyish blue-green, and drew a tiny flower stem on a 20 by 20 pixel square, and let the computer dither that. Then, magnified for an 800% zoom, and chose one of the new shades of green for the background, and a second new shade of green for part of the flower's leaf.

Then I made a custom shade of purple, and drew the tiny flower petals, and again, I let MSpaint do it's dithering magic.

Then, I kept selecting and pasting, magnifying each layer by differing amounts, choosing different parts to crop, and pasting again, "Saving as" a .jpg after each step.

The result is here (final image: 810x810 pxls; 47 Kb). I really like the result.

Remember, only two of those colors are ones I created deliberately. The rest is fractalicious chaos.