Carl Rustung

January 2022

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:19:22 GMT

Oh, and there’s the usual ambition of drawing something every day, too. That... didn’t work. “Every day” is tough! Here’s the current tally:

Days with nothing learned: 9
Days without drawing: 14 (ouch)

It’s hard to find the time (and way too easy to blame the kids), so it was inspiring to read Justin Fuller’s blog post about Arnold Bennet’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day:

[Arnold Bennet] suggests that we use the evenings for learning. About what? It doesn’t matter, really. But you should spend your time learning about something. [...] The point is that you spend your time learning about something you’re interested in so that you experience it more deeply.
[...]
Bennet has a few words of caution for us.
First, he recommends that we start small. With a small amount of time and small expectations. Don’t try to apply this every day of the week. Give yourself a window of an hour for thirty minutes of reflection; expect interruptions and distractions.
Next, he recommends that we don’t become too strict about our regimen. The idea is for the learning and reflection to serve our life, not for our life to serve the regimen.
With anything that improves life, we have to avoid becoming a snob about it. There may be reasons that it doesn’t work for everyone, or why they can’t implement it. Improving ourselves is enough work already — there’s no need to worry about improving everyone else.
Finally, we should be cautious of failure at the beginning. Learning of a way to improve one's life can come with a strong motivation that disappears quickly when things get tough. Be careful not to overdo things.
Justin Fuller
Living on 24 Hours a Day
Jan. 12th, 2022

Some notes from January

The first computer-aided rendering of a simulated black hole was made in 1979 by Jean-Pierre Luminet. Stunningly accurate and beautiful, it was made by feeding punch cards into an IBM 7040 mainframe computer and hand plotting the output with ink on negative image paper. (Engadget article)

Matt Webb wrote a post about the time difference between Earth and Mars. The Martian day is just 39 minutes longer than an Earth day, which makes communication between the two planets surprisingly tricky.

In 1989, Scotland opened a nuclear reaction complex called Torness, designed in the 1970s as “ the UK's bid to build an export-earning civil nuclear power system”. Charles Stross describes it as a “colossal collision between space age physics and victorian plumbing” in a spectacular article about a recent visit.

There’s something called psychogenic death, which occurs when you’re so demoralized you enter a depression spiral, go beyond apathy, and shut down and die.

Clive Thompson has made a wonderful little site called Weird Old Book Finder, where you can input a search term and get a random old book in return. I tried searching for “food” and was presented with this mouthful of a title from 1859: “The Curiosities of Food; or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom” (Google Books) The gist of it is: if an animal exists, someone has made good eatin’ out of it. It reads like some explorer has traveled the world and eaten his way through a list of exotic and endangered animals. Elephant’s paw? Yes, please! Here’s a taste:

The armadillo, remarkable for its laminated shell, when baked in its scaly coat is a good treat, the flesh being considered delicate eating, somewhat like a rabbit in taste and colour. The flesh of the large twelve-banded Brazilian one (Dasypus Tatouay) is said to be the best of all. In South America there are several species of armadillo, all of which are used for food when met with.
Peter Lund Simmons, F.R.G.S., F.S.S.
The Curiosities of Food; or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom
Published by Richard Bentley, London, 1859

A common colophon from the days of hand writing or copying manuscripts was “Finished, thank God.”

Dinnertime questions

After discussing them with my 4-year-old, I fell down a rabbit hole about horseshoes. Are there different types? Like, is there a horseshoe version of, say, sneakers? Turns out horses have many types to choose from, but mostly corrective shoes for various (painful-sounding) hoof maladies.

The funnest fact was that the Romans shod their horses in hipposandals, similar to a modern hoof boot.

The world record for the loudest finger snap was recorded at 108dB. According to this handy chart, that’s about as loud as a live rock concert. (The average human pain threshold is 110dB.)

The stuff that causes the burning sensation in your nose when you have a bit too much mustard or horseradish (what I’ve now learned is called a pungent taste) is called an isothiocyanate.

Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress has its own Wikipedia page. (It’s a Gucci minidress with a Union Jack tea towel sown onto it by Geri’s sister.)

A polar bear can eat 50-60 kilograms of meat (usually seal) for dinner. Translated into 4-year-old units, that is my whole daughter and three of her kindergarten friends.

When hunting is good, the considerate bear will just eat the seal’s skin and blubber, leaving the rest of the meat for other animals. When it’s not so good, a carcass, some rodents or human garbage will do.

So that’s what that’s called

The Japanese term for forest bathing is shinrin-yoku.

When something you recently read about seemingly starts popping up everywhere, that’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (or frequency illusion)

When you decorate something with the goal of faking a different shape or space, often creating an illusion of three-dimensionality where there is none, it’s called Trompe-l'œil. (See also forced perpective and dazzle camouflage.)

An image that contains a smaller image of itself, which contains a smaller image of itself, and so on, is using the Droste effect. Used to find it quite unsettling when I was little. (via Austin Kleon)

Character Jam à la Barry

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 21:48:03 GMT

Lynda Barry has a lot of good tips for how to unclog your creativity. In a couple of her books (Syllabus and Making Comics), she presents an exercise she calls a “Character Jam”.

There are some great examples on her tumblr.

Drawing exercises in Barry’s “Syllabus” (front) and “Making Comics” (back).

For the Character Jam, you split a sheet of paper into 16 frames, and make little caption boxes underneath each frame. Then you fill in one caption box with some kind of name or character description “that make you picture someone” and pass the sheet to your neighbor. You keep passing papers around until all 16 captions are filled.

Lynda’s suggestions for character captions

A wild tit appears

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:11:36 GMT

Dear diary,

A great tit flew into our house today. It probably landed on the sill below our bedroom window and found itself on the wrong side of the glass when trying to leave. Maybe it followed a tasty insect inside, or maybe it was a juvenile, too young to have learned that houses are scary places.

In any case, it came crashing through the living room while I was playing with our 7-month old. I rushed to get the veranda door open, while it fluttered from a curtain to the sofa to a hanging lamp cord. Door finally open, it chose a potted cactus on top of a cabinet as the perfect spot for an emergency landing and a bit of a poo.

Silly bird.

I suspect tits are unfamiliar with cacti, but it showed a remarkable ability to avoid impaling itself, even in a panic. By now the bird was exhausted, so I gently lifted the cactus outside, took a quick bird portrait, and left it alone. It sat there for a while, petrified, but by the third time I peeked outside it was gone.

One stressed out Parus.

Stay safe, little great tit.

Flower modeling

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 22:54:21 GMT

Trying to make some simple flowers in Cinema 4D, thought I’d try something new. I’m experimenting with a hand-drawn look.

Peeking at a reference image, I drew some flower parts in Procreate.

After turning the drawing into a texture map, I could make a simple 3D model and UV map everything into place.

Success!

Instagram birds, 2014–2017

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 10:15:00 GMT

December 22nd, 2014: Starting this post off with the same old mallards (Anas platyrhynchos). These guys are used to being fed old bread (which one shouldn’t do, I’ve heard), and go nuts for food in the winter. Very cute, and absolute bastards.

January 5th, 2015: Was very surprised to see a grey heron (Ardea cinerea) on my way to work, never seen one in Akerselva before and definitely not in the winter.

April 6th, 2015: Noticed a crow’s nest above a busy highway. Wouldn’t have chosen that spot myself, but it shows how well they adapt to life in the big city.

June 2nd, 2015: A duck... in a tree???

June 11th, 2015: Spring is a good time to watch for fieldfare chicks (Turdus pilaris), usually see them bouncing around in parks waiting for their parents to bring them some food. This one looked a bit lost, perched on top of a Mercedes.

30th of October, 2015: This hoodie (Corvus cornix) kept me company while waiting for the bus. It wouldn’t fly, looked like it was missing some tailfeathers.

November 13th, 2015: Feral pigeons (Columba livia domestica) waiting in line for the library to open.

January 26th, 2016: The crow and gull gang waiting for victims in the fog.

April 8th, 2016: Don’t know what this hoodie was up to, crowing to the ladies about his glorious garbage can or telling everybody to back off, but I love the attitude on display here.

May 9th, 2016: A starling (Sturnus vulgaris) singing in a cherry tree. Ah, spring.

May 25th, 2016: Ducklings! Aww.

July 6th, 2016: This little seagull chick must have fallen down from the roof, it wandered around looking confused until it collapsed outside our office door. We tried to give it some tuna (which you’re not supposed to do, I learned later!) and convinced the building super to let us carry it up to the seagull-infested roof, hoping its mama would find it.

I still worry about it sometimes.

May 29th, 2017: More mallards! More ducklings! (Aww.)

Instagram pics from Oslo, 2014–2019

Sun, 17 Oct 2021 19:53:27 GMT

2014

February 6th, 2014: This is the river (or creek, really) Akerselva, that splits downtown Oslo in twain. Most of these pictures are taken nearby, since I lived and worked right next to it for many years. (See the bird pics post for more of those mallards.)

May 8th, 2014: Out for an evening walk and photo safari with my buddy Peder. This is outside the lab building, Bygg 25, at Ullevål Hospital. (There will be more photos of that building.)

Also May 8th, 2014: Earlier that evening, we came across this sinister-looking elephant in someone’s garden. Maybe an evil sculptor lives there.

2015

February 10th, 2015: This sunset was crazy, but simply too garish to reproduce in color. (As a sidenote, this was the view from my office, and my apartment was at the other end of the park. Short commute!)

March 20th, 2015: Watching a partial solar eclipse from my balcony. The cloud cover made it possible to watch the eclipse without sunglasses or anything, which was pretty cool! At 10:53AM, the sun was just this little grin in the sky.

August 12th, 2015: Another balcony shot of unusual things in the sky, this time: a hot air balloon! (And some chimneys, I guess.)

August 15th, 2015: More rooftops, this time from downtown Oslo. The brick towers belong to Oslo’s City Hall. The green thing on top of the left one is a marvellous carillon, playing live music (!) every hour from 7AM to midnight.

October 26th, 2015: Sunset view from my apartment, liked the rooftop silhouette.

November 2nd, 2015: Here’s that lab building again, Bygg 25. It might be brutalism. I love it.

2016

January 7th, 2016: Left-hand sun dog.

January 8th, 2016: An old Ford of some kind? Project cars, I guess.

February 17th, 2016: Retro-looking, not-in-a-good-way-but-somehow-cool-anyway, signage above Grensen.

Pepsi was invented by a pharmacist in 1893. That very same year, the royal apothecary Kronen opened right across the street from this, a pharmacy run by my great grandfather from 1931 to 1950.

February 27th, 2016: An old tram! Beautiful old machines, a rare treat to see one out and about. This one is barreling down Vogts gate, through Torshov.

July 1st, 2016: I love rooftops. These particular rooftops are seen from a theatre building downtown. The domed building near the top-right corner is the National Theatre, a much grander specimen.

October 18th, 2016: Oslo has these little oases of old, wooden buildings right in the middle of downtown, it’s like stumbling into a time machine.

The yellow house is called Biermannsgården and dates back to the first half of the 18th century. It houses a music school for kids, among other things.

December 7th, 2016: Another elephant! Was walking to work one morning when someone had installed this sad-looking elephant statue during the night. The mallards seemed to enjoy its company.

2017

February 8th, 2017: From the main stairwell in my old apartment building at Sagene. Used to be a dorm for nurses. (The apartments were very small.)

April 7th, 2017: Vandalism, Maridalsveien

April 23rd, 2017: Liked this little stairway down from Stensparken.

May 24th, 2017: St. Pauli Biergarten (and nursing home!), upper Grünerløkka.

August 17th, 2017: That building again.

September 23rd, 2017: Having a hipster moment at Akershus Fortress, watching the koi and writing in my Moleskine notebook after attending a talk by extraordinary illustrator Malika Favre.

October 19th, 2017: Can’t get enough of Bygg 25, apparently. (The reason why we were visiting the hospital so much this fall, by the way, was because we were expecting our first daughter in November.)

December 7th, 2017: Back to school! Spent most of December at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design’s library, doing research and preparing to work on my diploma project.

December 8th, 2017: An alley behind the buildings of Oslo’s main street, Karl Johans Gate. Love stumbling into these hidden areas.

2018

January 16th, 2018: Oslo had one heck of a snowfall. This is a bus and tram stop, the glowing numbers are expected waiting time. Oslo’s public transport is never on time, but rarely more than 5 minutes late. 17 minutes usually means: “nothing’s running today, hope y’all have good shoes and a warm coat”. (I had good shoes.)

April 21st, 2018: Visited Oslo Transport Museum, a dusty old train garage full of time machines you can climb aboard. (It’s one of my favorite museums.)

Was there to do research on a network of trolley buses that no longer exists. The regular trolleybus was called a hippo, and the extra large hippo was lovingly referred to as svigermor, meaning mother-in-law.

The tram with the fancy behind is a goldfish.

May 16th, 2018: The last week of working on my master thesis, I drove up to the woods to get some peace and quiet. Here I’m sitting with my feet in the water, after rocking in a fetal position for a while. A few days later I hiked for an hour and set up my laptop on a picnic table, which was nice.

May 25th, 2018: Clop clop, it’s the sound of the police. The long face of the law spotted at Karl Johans Gate.

July 15th, 2018: Some of our neighbors used their dry-ass balcony flower pot as an ashtray. Shouldn’t have done that.

August 23rd, 2018: Karl Johans Gate again, bootleg Mickey sneakin’ around. (Where are the horse cops when you need ’em?)

October 21, 2018: Strolling through the graveyard.

2019

February 8th, 2019: From Grensen, looking toward Stortorvet and Oslo Cathedral a chilly morning.

Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 12:48:39 GMT

Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse, Delaware (Photo by James Hatcher, CC BY-NC-ND)

Stumbled upon a picture of this wonderful building in an old book. It‘s called the Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse and sits in the Delaware Bay. Lighthouses are usually pretty fascinating, but there‘s something special about a house just sitting on a pillar out in the ocean.

Some interesting stories from the link above:

James C. Jones was appointed the first head keeper of the lighthouse and served in this capacity until his passing in 1895. In June 1911, Assistant Keeper Lewis F. Robinson committed suicide at Fourteen Foot Bank by drinking carbolic acid. His companion at the lighthouse heard Robinson cry for help after downing the liquid, but all he could do was watch Robinson die in agony, after expressing remorse for his act. The previous December, Keeper Robinson broke his ankle at the lighthouse and had to wait two weeks before being able to get off the station and receive medical attention. A newspaper article reporting his death conjectured that “the sufferings he endured while ill affected his mind and that led him to commit the rash deed.”
Fourteen Foot Bank was the first assignment in the lengthy career of Chester P. Joseph. During the winter of 1917-1918, Keeper Joseph was stranded at the station for three straight months, as heavy ice floes prevented any relief from reaching the lighthouse. Joseph and the other marooned keeper busied themselves with every conceivable task, but life soon became monotonous. The ice fields that occasionally banged against the foundation did provide some excitement, as they would cause any unsecured item on a table or countertop to slowly migrate to the edge and fall off. After the ordeal, Joseph confessed, “I don’t believe I ever was as tired looking at one person in my life.”
On November 15, 1931, a party of three female high school teachers and five young men from Millville, New Jersey became lost in their motorboat during a thick fog. After exhausting their supply of food and water and nearly their fuel, the group made it to Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse the following day by following the sound of its foghorn and was welcomed aboard by its keepers. An intensive search for the missing boat had been launched by the Coast Guard, but it wasn’t until a relief keeper was brought to the station on November 17, that news of the group’s whereabouts made it to shore. Later on the 17th, a Coast Guard vessel took the group off the lighthouse, and with their motorboat in tow, returned them to Millville.
Lighthousefriends.com
Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse

Link dump special: Signs and storefronts reference

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 12:18:29 GMT

Hitting tumblr in search of storefront reference images. Here are a few good ones:

street signs & storefronts
London Shop Fronts
Liverpool Shopfronts
Once Upon a Town is a fantastic collection of historical city photos
Beauty and Neglect has a lot of empty scenes with decaying buildings (plenty of brutalism)
Creative Boom feature about Ben Hassett‘s L. A. liquor store photos

Also, Colossal has featured some great illustrators drawing Korean and Japanese storefronts:

Lee Me Kyong, part one and two
Colorful storefronts by Angela Hao

GitHub Mania

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 09:35:28 GMT

Mentioned earlier that “I can track my mental health by looking at the frequency of GitHub commits”, here‘s how that looks:

The first half of 2018 stands out because that‘s when I worked with my diploma project, but the other activity is more or less hypomanic fixating on this website.

Welcome to Fishbone

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 11:38:09 GMT

I guess my thing is imaginary places with stairs going everywhere. Must be some kind of jungle gym fever left from my childhood, something about verticality and exploration.

It started as this doodle in Procreate (above), but at some point I caught 3D fever (see: hypomania) and started making a model of one of the buildings. Then I thought: “What if I can use a 3D model as an underpainting for a hand drawing”, and then it was too much fun modeling all sorts of little props and details and... so it’s grown into something else.

Screenshot of Cinema 4D viewport

The idea is a dense, little borough called Fishbone, where everything is about fish for some reason. They have an annual Salmon Run Festival, where participants don colorful fish costumes, run up all the stairs and dive off the central building into the sea. Not pictured so far: any people at all.

The fishmonger

I originally planned to draw the people in Procreate, but as the detail level started to rise, so did the need for proper shadows and reflections and stuff. I’m no good at drawing people, but I’m not very good at modeling them in 3D either, so I think I’m going to aim for something in the middle: block the bodies in with Cinema, then paint in the detail on the iPad.

I’ve taken some inspiration from cities like Hong Kong, but don’t want it to look or feel like any real place in particular, and definitely not some cyberpunk metropolis. I want it to be quite colorful in the end—it’s like a challenge for myself and the people of Fishbone: how can we liven up this drab pile of concrete?

Mural welcoming visitors to Fishbone.

Most of the little brands (Uaru, Rasbora etc.) are names from a Wikipedia list of freshwater aquarium fish. Some textures are painted in Procreate, but the vast majority are just procedural materials using Cinema’s excellent noise shader.

You can get some stylized plant-looking stuff going with noise shaders, too! These petunias use layered noise for the leaves, but I still have to place every flower by hand.

Using an old version of Cinema 4D, I don’t have any of the fancy tools for, say, distributing lots of small objects in a certain order... Making things like ivy is a real hassle. Quite relaxing, though, just listening to a podcast and placing leaves one by one.

Placed each of these ivy leaves by hand, still not finished.

Speaking of shaders, I’m not really using any lighting here - all the materials are self-illuminating, but shaded according to a single light source. This gives me a lot of control over colors. I also use a bit of low-sample ambient occlusion to mark some nooks and crannies, and some fog volumes to separate background and foreground.

CARP - We are garbage

I’m currently having a lot of fun with this piece, but know from experience that it might take a while to finish (if ever). Unlike other hypomanic obsessions, though, it feels within reach this time.