From jholbo’s A Very Haeckel Christmas set:

Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 “Kunstformen der Natur” [Artforms of Nature] is a classic of biological illustration. What is less generally known is that the artist started as a Christmas card designer. The book was originally simply an album of holiday designs.

“All the sweet things that the Squiddies/Twittering in the dewy spray/Wish each other in the springtime/I wish you this happy day.”

During the Victorian era Christmas was indeed regarded as a ‘happy’ day, but one of uncanny terror; accordingly, cards and ornamentation featured strange creatures with too many tentacles. But then Santa Claus became popular, and many of these older designs ‘fell out of fashion’.

Commercially marooned, unable to draw anything except tentacles and congeries of pustules/bubbles, Haeckel wandered into natural ’science’ – almost as an afterthought – when he discovered that the stuff he had been drawing actually existed, give or take a tentacle. Isn’t that interesting?

Of course, Ernst Haeckel didn’t continue to make Christmas cards for the rest of his career. Kunstformen der Natur is a classic in scientific illustration and art nouveau. High resolution scans of many of the plates are available here.

The latest to draw inspiration from Haeckel is Robert Hodgin of flight404 fame. Robert is probably best known for the iTunes 8 built-in visualizer he calls “Magnetosphere“.

Robert says:

I became quite fond of his work because I had been exploring similar (looking) ideas with my own work. I was fascinated by Platonic solids and would sketch them in my journal to kill time during art history lectures. I was drawn in by the challenge of trying to reproduce such regular forms using no rulers or measurements. I didn’t realize it at the time, but figuring out how to draw those solids ended up being a nice little primer to learning trig later in life.

However, sketching these forms became more and more frustrating because I had to draw them head on with no rotation. My mind couldn’t make sense of it any other way. This created some really sterile illustrations. I liked the results, but they felt very flat.

Recently, while tweaking the magnetic structure code and the corresponding particle systems involved, I figured out how to gain a bit more control. The original code had been about freedom. I allowed the particles to move about and they pretty much got to do what they pleased. This new go around is about controlled restraint. I started to create multiple particle systems (instead of just one global one) and for each system, I am assigning it a small set of rules.

Robert continues:

Big particles, you will slowly gain mass until you lock into place. You are capable of attracting small particles. Each of you must remain a fixed distance from the center of the world and must try to spread yourselves out as evenly as possible.

Small particles, you will repel each other while the big particles attract you. If you happen to collide with a big particle, you are now locked to that particle and must remain x paces from its center at all times. Oh, and you must also remain y paces from the center of the world at all times.

From these simple rules, a large variety of different looks can be created by just randomizing a few variables. You can randomize the x and y, the mass, the charge, and the inertia, to name a few.

Below is a test render.

Self organizing dodecahedron flower from flight404 on Vimeo.

Finally, Robert concludes:

While watching this video, I realized I probably had enough control over the results to create a radiolarian generator. I added a few more rules and was able to get a nice lush variety of results. Below are some images from the first go around. I think there is a great deal of potential.

Thanks Robert and Ernst, and merry Christmas!