How does one turn an object into fractal?

Question

I've seen a lot of digital art made using fractals e.g landscapes, flowers, trees and the like, but I was wondering how does one turn an object into a fractal? Like say....if I wanted to make a fractal image of my cat, or house or neighbour how would I go about that?

Answer 1

Construct an iterated function system, see for example the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system, that constructs the original image with on iteration from a simple geometric shape (such as line representing ground). Then iterate. The result is likely to be messy.

Answer 2

It is very easy to construct a fractal resulting from the iteration of some linear contraction maps (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system). The reverse process is much more difficult, and is called "fractal compression" because it would describe a complex image by a (hopefully) small set of contraction maps. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression