
I have a chapter in this excellent book, along with a variety of international artists and designers, including Jonathan Harris, Carla Diana, and Aaron Koblin. The book includes step-by-step tutorials by each author.

Petals is the second of two Flickr tools designed to decontextualize colour in an image. In this case, images are retrieved from Flickr using a keyword search.Once the images are loaded, flowers are generated dynamically, each one representing a piece of the image's colour space. A simple space-filling algorithm insures that the screen is more or less evenly filled.
The end result is a floral version of the photo. The effect is quite painterly, and varies quite a lot depending on the colour and composition of the source image. The application also allows users to enter in a valid image URL - so any image can be converted into a flower patch.
Petals was built in Flash, using ActionScript 2.0. It uses Kevin Luck's excellent Flashr wrapper.
* Have you Petalized any of your own images? If so, please send them to me, and I'll post them in this thread for everyone to see.