For the past few years, I have been working at Electronic Arts online casual gaming company, Pogo.com, as a staff artist. I have been primarily designing game art, costumes, backgrounds, and badges. On Monday I was laid off due to overseas outsourcing. I feel sad about this, especially since every single day I came into work feeling excited and happy about the work I was doing. I always took every single project seriously, no matter how 'small' or how 'big' the assignment was. I've always held that if an artist is a good artist, no matter what he or she touches, it should be of the highest quality and taken seriously.

I began working for Pogo/Electronic Arts as a contractor in 2003. At that time I designed some games, Canasta, Pinochle and a few others, while also providing lots and lots of artwork for various other games, like Mahjong, TriPeaks, etc. Eventually Pogo began a program called the Pogo Mini's, avatars for the users that can be customized with faces, skin color, facial expressions, hair, clothing, costumes, backgrounds, accessories, and even pets. I enjoyed this work SO much and always tried to bring interesting and fun items to our users.

While I worked at Pogo, I designed a few games. Here is some of the art I created for the game Canasta. The idea I had for the characters in this game is a 50's nuclear family, with the wild cards being Beatniks. The male Beatnik became really popular is still used today in badges and other Pogo art. All of this was designed in Flash and is vector based. This was a really fun project!

(click on art for larger version)
At one point, Pogo was playing with the idea of creating a Pogo Kids website, complete with kids games and an avatar system, all created in Flash/Illustrator. This was (and still is, I believe) to honor a deal that Electronic Arts has with Hasbro, who they have partnered with in the online gaming community. Although these initial concepts never came to fruition, I enjoyed designing some interesting characters that would be vector based. I really loved the graphic look we had in mind for the concept.

(click on art to see larger version)
I had the opportunity to design a few games which needed game art as well as characters. I designed these characters and illustrated these desktops as free give aways to Pogo users.

Over the weekend, I took a class called "Mother Winter" at this store in Berkeley called Castle in the Air. Each of us made a unique figure that reflected the description, the concept being a figure on top with a small scene underneath inside a bell glass jar. The class was conceived of and taught by the talented and wonderful Ulla Milbrath, a textile artist who teaches classes at Castle in the Air.

Although this kind of art is pretty far removed from my usual painting and illustrating, I find it quite inspirational. I have a couple of secret projects in the works on the side which are entirely personal, and come from themes somewhat related to this figure, at least in tone. I think artistically, it is important to stretch ourselves in ways that are far out of and sometimes unrelated to what we normally do. Somehow, this practice stirs the cauldron of creativity, loosening up ideas from the depths that might not otherwise rise to the top.

The work of other students in the class can be seen here.