Simon Stålenhag

Project Brief

Simon Stålenhag

These are some of his pieces of artwork that really stood out to me. I like the amount of realism that is within his art, but it also feels slightly cartoonish, maybe because of the various colour shades. The large buildings that can be seen in the background of these parts of art he creates looks a bit futuristic, which looks interesting in comparison to the more modern world around them. Somehow, the way he colours everything makes it all look really clean. The key also looks incredible, since you can tell easily that the holding part is a rubbery material and the other parts are metal.

My Stålenhag style drawing is going to be based on Saint Michael's Mount. I think it's a nice landscape that could get his style put onto it in a really creative way. Replacing the castle with a large building or piece of infrastructure to give it a more futuristic vibe is ideal for getting the artwork to be as similar to his as possible. I have also attached some images from Stålenhag's art that I will probably use as inspiration for mine. The first one having the highway built above ground is something I'm interested in doing and putting into the scene since something like this is certainly possible to have within the area at some point in time.

Diving deeper into the building's design idea, it could be cool to give it an evil look in a way to make it seem like this island is secluded for a reason. I also really like the way that the last piece of art I have put here has water droplets on the screen. I'm not sure how to replicate it quite the same, but I might try anyway since it looks really cool. 

Throughout this lesson, we learnt about Simon Stålenhag and his artwork. We had a quick look at some of his work, analysing what makes it unique and appealing. We chose some of our favourite pieces that we found in the moment and had a quick talk about them. We then went on to start drawing some concept art of what we might do for our piece that is going to resemble Stålenhag's art.

I think the brief shows that it could be a challenging piece of work, but one that is going to help us quite a bit. Since we are going to be doing this art digitally, we are going to be using Photoshop mostly to compose it. This gives us tools to do, as it states, things like photo editing. We are then also going to be bringing some 3D work into this, which could make our work look more realistic since rendering an image of our model is a lot easier than drawing something 3D unless you are really good at drawing and not so much 3D modelling. Either way, I like Stålenhag's art style so hopefully this will be a good project.

From researching, I learned that Stålenhag has a very realistic art style with a bit of a gloomy atmosphere, but somehow makes each scene seem quite comforting in some way. He likes to do a lot of art with certain buildings and quite a few vehicles, which are some things I'll probably have to consider to make a piece of art that is as similar to his as possible. This will inform my plan to tackle the brief since I know I'll have to do a lot of editing of pictures and probably a bit of modelling to get a good-looking picture.

My final idea for my artwork at this moment in time is going to be the camera looking at Saint Michael's Mount (either from the ground or a birds-eye view) and there is going to be a large building instead of a castle. There will be lots of wires hanging down. Ideally, I then want to add a highway that maybe loops around it, which you can see cars and stuff driving upon. I might make it so everything is in good condition, or I'll make it look like an abandoned area that not many people go to anymore, possibly with broken infrastructure. I think having it more run-down and almost in the past is probably a better idea, however, drawing and modelling broken things is more difficult than clean, newer things.

To bring this idea to life, I will need to use Photoshop mostly to try and bring the image to life, however, I think I'll need to use 3DS Max a bit to make some models that I can texture and render to be used inside of the 2D image. I will need quite a few reference images, which I already kind of have, to keep referring back to for Stålenhag's artwork and ideas of what I'm drawing.

Photo References & Bashing

For the next part of the Stålenhag project, it was time to start photobashing images together to get a better idea of what we wanted the final result to look like. Photobashing is the art of fusing multiple images together by cutting parts out, putting them on a different image, and adjusting colours so that they look natural in the artwork.

To start with, I first got the reference image of Saint Michael's Mount, which was best for my artwork. It is the same image that I already found above since I thought it was so good. Next, I needed to find a tower that I liked which I could edit onto the top of the mountain. I thought this one fitted the theme of my short story the best, and it already had some wires hanging down that I might be able to at least use as a baseplate sort of thing. The first thing I did was cut out the tower from the image and paste it ontop of the island. I then also cut out some of the bushes and stuff as a different layer so I could put something in front of the tower to make it seem a bit more natural in its place. As you can see, this is what I had in the end.

Then I needed to get the sky done. Since I didn't have much, I decided to use Photoshop generative AI to fill in the sky. To get this result, I first copied a section of the sky and filled all of the area with it. I then selected the area and told the AI to "Make the sky better", and it did. It isn't perfect since I think I'd prefer it to still have that cloudy darkness to it, but it's good enough. Because the sky around the tower is a bit brighter, it gives it that spotlight idea and helps you to focus in on it. I'm relatively pleased with how it is turning out so far, and hopefully, it will get even better.

For now, this is where I got up to. I tried to use the generative AI to fill in the wires/cables, but no matter what I asked, it didn't give me anything great, and it altered the tower's overall shape slightly which I didn't like, so I decided to draw my own which didn't turn out too bad. A couple things I then did was I moved the layers around a bit so there's more of the original island shown in the picture, and the cables are behind the tower and island layers. I then made a bit more of the island to fill in the gaps that the cables were overhanging, but it still looks very real. Finally, I added some effects to the tower and cables to give them smoother outlines and some shadows to further enhance their appearance in the image. There is also a very slight light around the tower that gives it a little more of a shiny look.

In this lesson, we got some reference images from online and did some photo bashing inside Photoshop to better understand what we wanted the final design of the Stålenhag-styled artwork to look like. For this, I learned that you can go off and get reference images from websites and people have uploaded images that you can use, however, a lot of the time they require you to purchase a license. We got our images (I used the original image that I found of Saint Michael's Mount and a photo of Stålenhag's for a building. I then edited out the castle, put the tower in its place, and made some additional changes. This then gives the illusion that the tower is there if you make it look real enough by using layers to blend it into the environment.

I think so far the project is going as intended. I have been creating the artwork that has been needed so far and it has looked quite good. If we have to do more drawing ourselves, this could be my main weakness since I'm not a great artist. But the photo bashing has so far been going well.

The next steps could be adding more to the photo-bashed image to change how everything looks, relating it more to the story that I created. Since it's quite a while in the future, things might look a bit more polluted, and ideally I wanted to have a road that curves around the tower, but this is going to be difficult since I didn't find many reference images that would be suitable, which might mean I have to model and render it.

I think something that would be good to learn to help me would be some more Photoshop skills, as well as doing some modelling and rendering images from that which I'd be able to use inside of my 2D projects.

Starting the Main Design

Completing the Rest of the Artwork

To begin this lesson of completing the design, I started off by finishing off the water. This was mostly just doing the right side, but I did adjust the left side a bit too. I used the same wet paint brush on the water because I really liked the effect it gave. I'll probably use the same one for the sky later on when I get onto it because it's the perfect brush for getting simplistic but realistic looking detail. Furthermore, I start off with a fairly high intensity and then blend everything together after with a very low intensity. With the high amount, I make sure to try to separate the different colours. Since I know I was not just going to leave it like that, I don't have to worry about what it looks like at this point. I just focus on getting the right amount of colour in each section of the water.

I then also got a rough brush and made the rocks a bit bolder to stick out more in the water. After that, I rounded off the tops of them with the same brush at a lower intensity by using some water colour instead. You can sort of see where I began the landscape on the left side. I don't like it much, but it should look better when I blend it all together.

Here is what the main island part looks like complete. I'm not massively happy with it since it looks very blurry, and I would've preferred a bit more detail. But having a smaller brush would've taken ages considering this already took a long time, so I think it's, good enough considering everything. I thought that the little blending of the bottom part of the land to the water looked cool, though. The way that it almost has a sort of shadow makes the immersion a bit better. I think I probably could've added something a bit more for a shadow since the island doesn't have much of anything, but it's not too bad. If anything, I should've removed some to have a more definitive shadow for the tower, which may have looked better than this. Either way, I think the island has a more simplistic look that doesn't look great, however, it isn't meant to be the main centre of attention, so it works for me — and you can tell what everything is meant to be.

Here, I was doing the sky, but thought I could include a couple of images to sort of show the steps that I take, similar to that of the water making. The left image is when I first was using the smudge tool to get the rough colours found for the clouds. As you can see, I make it quite blotchy which does look good actually, but since the rest of the image has smoother edges, ideally I need to smoothen it out.

After completing the first stage, I make the brush smaller and decrease the amount of intensity so it's very low. I then go around each part of the sky and smudge it until it looks nice and smooth. There is a clear difference, and I think it does look better for the style of image that I'm going for here. Although this does take a long time because I may be trying to get one specific spot looking good for a while, it certainly pays off. I think I really like how it came out, however, the clouds on the left-hand side at the top of the screen look a little poor. They are the only ones that really stick out to me as not really being blended in enough, but it isn't something that is extremely noticeable unless you specifically look for it.

Final Design & Evaluation.

And here is the completed piece of artwork in the style of Simon Stålenhag!
I think it looks quite good, and resembles his artwork in a decent way. Is it perfect and exactly how I wanted it? No, I think some more details on the island were certainly needed, and I ideally wanted a bit more going on in the image, but this still gives off my main sort of idea in a fairly good way.

I think this project was a great way to help us understand how to get a great view of what we want our games to look like. By doing some concept art by getting reference ideas, photo-bashing them together and then putting a certain art style on them, this becomes a great way of generating ideas for a game and getting a visual representation to remind you of original ideas. It also helps others understand your thought process and what you expect to get at the end of production.

My original plans for this project was to have a tower replace the castle on top of Saint Michael's Mount, which happened. However, I also wanted a sort of motorway that is being supported on stilts looping around it with people looking down on the island. This part didn't happen since I never found an image of something that I liked, and I didn't have a good enough visualisation to draw it. What I did think of doing in the end was use a bridge from GTA5 since they have some cool bridges that match the description I want, but I thought of this too late. This is something I'll remember going into other projects, though. I believe that unless you work in a AAA game company, the majority of ideas you come up with are probably already being worked on or released, so I might as well use that to my advantage. This could be either through grasping various ideas or including work that fits into the game. I think if I was to continue this or improve upon it another time, I'd maybe do some more sketches around the main idea, since I only did one sketch of it. Furthermore, this was before I even came up with a story that I might want the image to tell, which makes it that more difficult if I don't have some base ideas to work off of.

Building more on top of the differences between mine and Simon's work, he tells stories by having various pictures that can be linked together. For example, he has hundreds of various pictures which span across different sections, all helping to tell certain stories. The most recent one as of typing this is his “Swedish Machines”. In this section, there is one specific building that is repeatedly seen. There is also a large link to vehicles, and it seems to be telling a story on the development of technology and maybe some abandoned old stuff. Creating such lore within images requires a large set-out plan beforehand though, and a lot of dedication towards making this artwork. Considering the sections are released with several years apart, it's clear that he spends a lot of time carefully drawing these images, as well as getting plenty of reference images in person to get a better idea of what he wants.

I think my implementation of his art style didn't go too poorly, however, he just does it in a way which makes it so difficult to copy. This is due to the fact that even though it looks simple, it is so difficult to get a realistic picture but with a really easy looking style. He doesn't use lots of colours, but a few various ones to show the difference in lighting. The main thing that really separates his art from anyone's is his use of lines and shapes to display the theme and feeling that you get when looking at a picture. To me, it seems that he uses specific shapes and sizes of things to make something like the buildings more daunting than they actually are. I think it would've been better if I had sacrificed some time into just making the scene simpler, but even then it's so hard when comparing work to his because it just looks easy but isn't.

Overall though, I'm relatively pleased with how this project went. I think ideally I would've wanted it to look a bit different since the island buildings and everything else doesn't contrast well compared to the building which is something I probably should've edited more, but it's not too bad.

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