Hello.

Welcome to the online portfolio of Simon Stålenhag. I'm a 2D artist specializing in concept art and pixel art. On this site you'll find examples of my work.

I'm currently a game design student at Futuregames Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, and I'm chasing the perfect place to spend my 30 week internship period.

I also work together with Tommy Salomonsson under the creative brand Pixeltruss, and we make flash games. We have released the fluorescent retro experience of Metro Siberia, and are working on our next epic 16-bit era nostalgia title, Ripple Dot Zero.

 

Concept Art

 

 

 

 

 

Concept with SketchUp

I recently started to use SketchUp as a tool for creating concept art. A friend of mine showed it to me and I was impressed by it's speed and lightweight appearance.

I find it ideal for quickly setting up a rough guide for your picture. And you can very easily set the composition by just playing around with the camera, fog and shadow functions.

When I'm happy with the composition and basic lighting, I export the image and paint on top of it in Photoshop.

All in all, this piece took me about three days to complete.

 

Comparison between the SketchUp render and the final piece:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pixel Art

 

Ripple Dot Zero Game play video

Ok so here's a game play video of mine and Tommy Salomonsson's current project Ripple Dot Zero. My duties are to produce all art assets and levels, music and sfx. The game design is done together with Tommy over lunches and msn.

Run it HQ! There are precious pixels at stake here here!

 

 

Backgrounds

 

The backgrounds in Ripple Dot Zero are divided into several parallax scrolling layers. Here I've combined them to give an idea of how the art works together. That's also how I use to do when I'm about to create some new art for a level - I paint on a new layer on top of a combined background so that I can match the colors.

 

 

Animations

 

I use GraphicsGale when I do ixel art. When I started making pixel art I painted over scans of my sketches, but now I find it faster to just draw freely in GraphicsGale with the sketches on the desktop for reference.

Here's a selection of sprites I've done. Rollover to see animation.

Rollover for animation	Gallus Zebra This is an enemy from Ripple Dot Zero that live inside the Vivariums of the Oxygen Plant world. I looked at an ostrich for reference of the run cycle.
Rollover for animation	Crayfish I begin my animations with a rough sketch. When the movement is right I clean up the pixels and add the basic colors (right). Then I do a final more complex shading pass.
Rollover for animation	Blob Canon
	Waterfall in environment

 

Traditional Art & Book Covers

 

Before I studied game esign, I did illustration work including book covers for Leopard Förlag and Bonnier Carlsen.

 

Italienska Skor

Gouache on paper, 80*60 cm.

The cover of renowned swedish author Henning Mankell's "Italienska Skor", published by Leopard Förlag. The brief was to have realistic painting of a specific event from the book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Misc.

December Event

This was a four week UnrealED project we had in school tutored by level design guru Sjoerd De Jong.

 

 

 

 

Metro Siberia Game play vid

Metro Siberia has to date been played roughly 4 million times by people all over the globe. It was released in early 2008 and developed by me and Tommy salomonsson. I did all the art, level design and music/sfx.

Here's me trying to play level 3, The Gysi Express, which is the hardest and fastest level of MS. I make it pretty far, but I'm not what I used to be. I actually had the skill to make it through all three levels when we were developing it.