Florametrics
I created these images in Photoshop in 2004, from macro photos of flowers and plants. I’d only recently started to notice how amazing plants are (I know, I’m an idiot) and had an abundance of plant photos, so I started playing with them.
I isolated one (equilateral) triangle from any photo, then repeated that tile in a circle so that it made a hexagon; each second triangle also needs be flipped. Hexagons tessellate forever in every direction, so I made a background of those, and revealed either a single circle or several circles in the pattern under a white, circular mask.
Sometimes I’d take another triangle from one of these patterns and make a 2nd and then a 3rd generation, trying different things, like size and rotation, always working with threes/thirds when deciding what to change.
Floramatic
Andy Armstrong liked my images and created Floramatic in 2014 in javascript, which does the first step of the above.
Floramatic will supply a random image in the left pane, or you can drag one of your own images from your filesystem.
The coloured circles on the triangle all work differently, so try pulling them about. If you want to save a pattern you’ve created in Floramatic, use the image icon to save it to your device as a .png.
Florametrics
Source photos
Early Attempts
