By @JustinWetch
Bus Rides
Victor (aka @outrunyouth) never really had a single place to settle into. Growing up, he moved repeatedly in his hometown of Bergen, living in more than ten different homes before he turned sixteen. For him, this kind of movement was simply normal.
"I learned to find comfort in the bus rides, the moving cars," he says. "That liminal limbo state is definitely a familiar place for me."
Most people think of transit as the space between places that matter. Victor learned to live in it. The in-between wasn't something to endure until you arrived somewhere stable. It was the only constant he had. His current state might change at any time, so he had to be adaptable. He stopped expecting permanence and started finding peace in motion.
This is the key to his work. The foggy landscapes, the lone figures facing vast unknowns, the scenes that feel like you've stumbled into someone else's dream. His aesthetic choices are autobiographical.
Thirty Pupils
His Norwegian school had thirty students total. Three in his class. The building sat in a mountain town surrounded by forest, the kind of place where imagination fills in what civilization leaves empty.
"Norway is very rich in nature and folklore," Victor says. "Trolls, forest creatures, it's rooted in a lot of our culture. I had a lot of imagination about what lay beyond the school grounds."
His grandfather, a Spanish oil painter, was the family's creative anchor. The man started abstract and moved toward figurative realism over the decades, painting landscapes and people and nature. He's still painting now, approaching ninety. Victor grew up watching him work, absorbing the idea that making things was a legitimate way to spend a life, even if he wouldn't act on it for years.
He loved drawing and Legos as a kid. He thought he might study computer science. Instead he became a chef.
The Detached Years
When Victor was around ten, his stepfather was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The illness stretched across his adolescence, a slow decline that colored everything. By eighteen, the end was approaching, and Victor found himself feeling detached.
"It put me in a state of apathy because I couldn't process everything," he says. "It was a defense mechanism."
His stepfather passed in 2018. The grief didn't arrive clean. It sat there, unresolved, tangled up with years of anticipatory loss and the strange guilt of having protected himself by feeling less. He needed an outlet. Something to hold what he couldn't articulate.
He didn’t start exploring art right away. It came years later, as a gradual realization shaped by how those years had changed him.
Collage on a Phone
It was early 2020 when visual art entered the picture. Victor wanted to design a clothing brand. He made some graphics, liked the process more than the product, and kept going.
He built Instagram accounts around aesthetics, curating images every day for a year. Eventually he narrowed it down to one account, Outrunyouth, built around vaporwave colors: purple and pink skies, big red suns over city skylines, the whole lo-fi retro-future thing. Then he made a switch. Instead of curating other people's work, he started making his own.
For six months he did collage art on his phone using an app called Bazart, pulling from royalty-free image libraries and assembling something new every day. The discipline was there before the skill. He was training himself to show up, to finish things, to put work into the world and see how people responded.
"I really found it interesting and rewarding, like nothing else, to have an idea and then make it and see other people like it."
The process drew him him. Make something, post it, watch the reactions, learn what worked. He was building an audience before he had a fully formed voice, which meant the voice developed in public, shaped by feedback and repetition.
Eventually he got tired of slapping Unsplash images together. He wanted to build from scratch, to take full control of his imagination. That's when he discovered 3D.
Childlike Blender
Victor taught himself Blender the way he'd taught himself most things: by doing it wrong until he started doing it right. He had no formal training, no art history background. What he did have was thousands of hours in Minecraft.
"A big part of why Blender comes naturally to me is because I spent so much time playing Minecraft," he says, laughing. "It's basically like a fun, childlike Blender I grew up with."
He learned lighting by intuition. His process now is methodical but self-invented: start with basic geometry, place the landscape and character, get the composition right in simple shapes. Then add area lights, usually one white and one colored, balancing them to create a focal point. He'll spend hours moving lights a few centimeters, adjusting strength and exposure, chasing a feeling he can't quite name until he finds it.
One technical detail defines his look: he always uses a desaturated HDRI on low intensity, which keeps his shadows gray. A colorful sunset HDRI would throw purple or blue into the shadows and break the cohesion he's after. He goes through foliage assets individually, adjusting their colors to match the mood. When light hits vegetation, it evokes a feeling, and he wants that feeling to be intentional, not accidental.
The control is obsessive, but the results feel effortless, like the scenes simply exist and he's just pointing a camera at them.
The Viewer's Reaction
People see Victor's red lighting and assume it means something sinister. Evil, malice, danger. He finds this fascinating.
"To me it's just so strong and charged with emotion that it tells more about the viewer than the artwork itself," he says. "I love using it for contrast and for the viewer's experience."
His influences make sense once you see them: René Magritte, for the way a bowler-hatted man can make you question reality. John Martin, for vast cataclysmic landscapes full of chaos. Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic painter whose fog and light and solitary figures Victor gets compared to constantly. He's drawn to all of them, but he didn't study them formally. He absorbed what he needed by feel.
The philosophy in his work is deliberate. He made a collection called "Conversations with the Universe" that explored the tension between having answers within yourself and endlessly searching for them outside. He treats folklore not as cautionary tales to scare children but as invitations to explore the unknown. Every piece is a question he's more interested in asking than answering.
People expect him to be dark and withdrawn, like his art. He laughs at this. He's actually bright and friendly. "I'm not scary," he says.
The Wrap
Victor shouts out his community: @SkiluxDesigns, a recent collaborator and good friend, @BlankEmbrace, @0xcgda, a 3D artist he met at NFT Paris who he trades motivation with constantly. @bakuartiste from Suburbs Gallery, who proactively highlights artists in a way few people bother to do. @Inspector_9 (Brian), a longtime collector and supporter. @Julio_tnim and @mendezmendez, friends and collectors he's connected with along the way. He could go on. It speaks to how tight the community has stayed, even as the space has changed.
Artists inspiring him lately: @briscoepark ("the man of the hour"), @photonisdead, (a longtime inspiration), and @jamesshedden (mixed-media artist with a style entirely his own).
For future Weekly Dose episodes, Victor recommends @random_freaks, @1dontknows, and Ram @ram_dezin.