The Art of Ben Berntsen

Here's an example of the kind of mockups I would typically do during the pitch process. I do these very quickly (usually 1-2 days max) and rapidly iterate on with the creative director to quickly find the core of our idea.

This is a pitch mockup for a fast paced action/fighting game set in a crazy apocalyptic universe.

Artwork created for Marvel's unveiling of the beloved Spider-Gwen character. It was a real honor to get to work on this!

Two of my concepts for the general look and feel of Series. We tried a lot of different directions, probably dozens in total. My goal from the beginning was to find a style that stood out and inspired our audience but was also viable to reproduce in volume for all the content we would produce at a high cadence.

This art was meant to demonstrate the kind of “action gameplay” that we would feature in our experience. We wanted exciting moments like this to be interactive, but not too complicated and to weave organically into the storytelling.

This project eventually was released as Candidate Crunch

This was a mood piece for an unreleased project, intended to summarize the specific vibe and feeling we were going for. I have found that nothing is more effective than a quick but thoughtful piece of key art for effective vision sharing.

Spec work for an unreleased title

Key Art to illustrate the kind of interactions and gameplay that we would feature. We wanted to bring back some of the feel of classic Lucasarts adventure games and fold that into the storytelling experience.

This piece was made to demonstrate some of the vistas and scenarios we would experience in the story.

I pushed strongly that the crazy world our characters explored would feel more alive if it included an ecosystem of interesting creatures. Being a huge fan of nature documentaries, fleshing out this ecosystem with familiar-yet-uncanny creatures was a tremendously fun experiment.

Here's an example of the kind of mockups I would typically do during the pitch process. I do these very quickly (usually 1-2 days max) and rapidly iterate on with the creative director to quickly find the core of our idea.

This is a mockup for a character select screen that would show off all the cool characters a player can eventually collect.

This was a general mood piece. Ultimately this art style was abandoned for something a little bit edgier that would appeal more to older kids.

A sample of some of the environment concepts I did for Jimmy Nosferatu

Here's an example of the kind of mockups I would typically do during the pitch process. I do these very quickly (usually 1-2 days max) and rapidly iterate on with the creative director to quickly find the core of our idea.

This example is for a humorous zombie survival game with elements of classic games like Oregon Trail.

An Oregon Trail illustration I painted for a marketing project.

Example of fakes created for a simple one-button mobile game.

An example of a pitch mockup for a rhythm/music game

Quick mock-up for a personal game project

We experimented with a lot of different styles for the kids; particularly whether they should be younger or older. We ultimately settled on a look that was more edgy and aged up than any of these options.