In the useless but fun department, here is path-ladder. Basically it creates ladder steps between two paths, with a ton of parameters that I'm too lazy to document right now, but you are intelligent people who love to experiment. Basically it works like its cousin path-inbetweener: in the path list, you right-click on a path and you look for the tools submenu... The first option is a second path.

Available at the usual water hole.

Two ladders on the same pair of golden spirals, just changing the sides: (left/right for one first, right/left for the other):



Enjoy.

Looks cool; no time to play with it now but may experiment later. Thanks again ofnuts.

ofnuts: nice stuff!! this definitely has to be tried.

Rainbow DNA? Are you cloning hippies?

Nice Script.

Finally had time to play with this one; of course, added my own flare to it. lol

Nice. Looks very "organic".

Even more fun with a little additional script to iterate strategic parameters to create animations. Here it's just the bend factors for both paths that go from 0 to 100%:

Interesting how this works.
Thank you ofnuts.

That's part of the fun

First, when you ask for N steps, the script determines N points along the two paths (the "stretch factor" determines how these points are spread). Then it creates a Bézier spline (blue curve) between the two corresponding points on the paths (solid green lines) that become the anchors of the curve.



The fun begins with the tangent handles. The "incidence" is the angle (in red) between the perpendicular to the path at the control point (dotted green line) and the line from the control point to the tangent handle (in yellow). The "bend factor" is the length of that yellow line, expressed as a percentage of the distance between the two control points. The longer the line, the longer the curve remains close to the incidence angle, so that leads to more bendy ladder steps. Likewise, if 0, there is no tangent handle, so if you use zero on both sides, you get straight lines. The two "sides" selectors control which tangent handle is used. When "explicit" the script uses the designated sides. When "shortest" it computes the handles on both sides of the each path, then computes the four distances for the four possible pair of handles (one form each path) and keeps the pair of handles that has the shortest distance (this normally leads to the shortest spline).

Looks like a girl's head . Did you use Sides: shortest or Sides: explicit sides? If you used "explicit sides" I have a bug. Otherwise its a "feature"

Here are my settings.
Then i flipped the image vertical.

Relieved, that's only a feature...

Getting organic... I was looking at a tutorial for line art and the author was stroking paths with the Ink tool. Which lead me to experiment a bit:



Using these Ink options:

using the filter

As usual I had no idea what to expect as I was randomly playing with this script, just starting with a simple curved path and setting the parameters to see what turned out. Then I started randomly filling, stroking individual sets of paths to separate layers, just to see what they looked like. I needed to move some of the layers so I could see them better, and their shape just seemed so obvious; so I just duplicated and flipped them and they immediately flew off!



Another good one Ofnuts - thank you; more experienced users than me might be able to predict their shape results but this was pure chance.

Finished with surrealism/out of frame now and have gone back to where I left Ofnuts path-ladder script, stroking selected paths. I find one of the key facets of GIMP is its ability to pleasantly surprise when you do something completely by accident ...





... it is a very forgiving system!