Fractal Parity Pattern
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		Fern Mandelbrot Parity SeedHead

This fills a rectangle with a textured monochrome background by generating a fractal and mixing it with a grid. The fractal is very basic: start at the top left pixel, flip the colour (black to white or white to black) and copy it to the next pixel on the right, and the one below and the one to the bottom right to complete a new 2x2 pixel square... Now consider the 2x2 pixel square that you just painted to be the 'pixel' you are copying and continue the process, copying the inverse to the right and below, and bottom-right. The result is interesting but not subtle, until you exclusive-OR it with a simple grid pattern and a fine new wiggling pattern emerges:

After staring at the pattern for a while, the algorithm to draw a point at any x,y coordinate was clearly the parity algorithm applied to x | y! In other words, if you do a bitwise OR of x and y, then count how many bits are set to one, the pattern is black if there are an even number of set bits and white otherwise. The grid (that will be Exclusive ORed with this pattern) is black when the least significant bits of x and y are both set. So generating the background texture can be done with the following code:

class CParityStencil {
  virtual void SetPixel(WORD x, WORD y, DWORD Colour) =0;
public:
  void ParityFractal(const CRect& Rect) {
    for(int x=Rect.left; x<Rect.right; ++x) {
      for(int y=Rect.top; y<Rect.bottom; ++y) {
        int p=x|y;
        p^=p>>8; // Find the parity of x|y:
        p^=p>>4;
        p&=0x0F;
        p=(0x6996 >> p); // The least significant bit is now the parity
        if(x & y & 1) p^=1; // Change every other bit in the grid (comment this line out to see the parity drawing alone).
        SetPixel(x,y, p&1 ? 0 : 0xFFFFFF);
    } }
  }
};

These patterns are often not handled well by resizing algorithms, so if you're developing one, test it using these patterns! You can get other interesting patterns with: int p=x|~y; and int p=x^y;, for example. Try out other functions (with and without XORing the grid):

You can mix in as many 'Stencils' as you like to provide all the primitives you need.

The Colours, Drawing and Effects sections have further extensions.

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