With Valentine’s Day coming soon, here’s a quick tutorial on how you can create a heart-shaped fractal using the open-source program Apophysis (download it for free here).

1. After opening Apophysis, click on the Transform Editor button:

In the Transform Editor, click on the New Blank Flame button:

The Transform Editor window should look like this:

That red triangle you see is called a transform, and we can create all kinds of different effects by changing the values of the Variations. The window in the upper right lets us see a preview of our fractal.

2. In the Variation pane, set the linear value to 0 and the blur value to 0.5. The color of your fractal in the preview window may be different than the one below, and that is fine:

3. Add another transform on top of Transform 1 by clicking the “Adds a new triangle”…