Electronic Arts/Pogo.com Game Icon Designs

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I worked on many games at Pogo, for which assets were needed, such as these icons. All were done in either Photoshop or Flash. (even the koi!)

Canasta art for Electronic Arts/Pogo.com game

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!

Electronic Arts/Pogo + Hasbro Concept for Kids Avatars

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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.

Electronic Arts/Pogo Desktop and Character Designs

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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.

Electronic Arts/Pogo Virtual World concept

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At one point, Pogo was going to create a new game screen that functions similar to a home page, but with components that are customizable. We had also talked about creating a virtual world, in which the user could chat using their Pogo Mini avatars. For this demonstration, I created a world concept that was under the sea and placed a few Mini's. Here is the design. I also designed the other elements, as well.
Unfortunately the project never came to fruition. It's too bad - would have been a blast to work on!

Electronic Arts/Pogo Badge Designs

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I also illustrated many mix and match badges for Pogo.com. The users collected the badges as rewards for achieving a certain number of games won. The badge program at Pogo has been very successful for our users, who like to collect as many as they can!

Electronic Arts/Pogo Mini's Background Design

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Here are SOME of the many backgrounds I painted for the Pogo Mini's. Some were animated, as well. I dropped in a few Mini's to show how the system worked together with the backgrounds.

Electronic Arts/Pogo Minis Costume Design

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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.

I found this little watercolor I did for an illustration job several years ago. It's a little cheesy.

a couple of small watercolors from my sketchbook. The tree was in the Presidio and the tower is part of a highschool (the name of which I don't know) across from Dolores Park.

Colgate commercial

Here is a small illustration I did for Calabash, again. I think I painted this in 2007, a rough year for me, to say the least. Thankfully, work was great that year. I was freelancing for Pogo, got to work on a Spiderwick video game, and painted a lot for Calabash Animation Trix and Lucky Charms commercials. I also painted many of the oil paintings on my website that year and sketched incessantly in my sketchbook. Maybe by keeping busy, i was trying to escape the encroaching dread of a midlife crisis, bad choices in my personal life and a divorce. Thank god for being an artist.

Anyway, Calabash asked me to take the sketch below and illustrate it, bringing it to a more detailed and clean rendering. Normally I do not like to take on freelance work that has been sketched out for me entirely, however in this illustration I felt there were challenges in the rendering that I wanted to take a crack at, such as stone countertops, a mirror and running tap water. Given that I only had a day to paint this, it was probably a good thing that the sketch was already worked out.

Trix Color Script panels

I found a few color panels from a color script I did for Calabash Animation back in...hmmm...maybe 2007. This was for a Trix cereal commercial that was done for the Mexican market. I had fun painting these.

Here are some packaging illustrations I did for a tea company about five years ago. The rendering is a lot tighter and more detailed than I would prefer; the client asked me to make sure they looked as realistic as possible while still maintaining a painted look. I'm not sure if I pulled it off. I'm also not sure about those ellipses. The illustrations have been sitting in my archive for a long time, so I thought I'd give them some fresh air. There are a few more in this series, but these are the best.

I added a background and more detail to the seahorse painting I started earlier. I am working on a few more of these, too. I am having fun messing around with the color scheme and lighting of the deep.

Sketch Comps/Greeting Card illustration

One of the first clients I found right as I left art school in the early 1990's was a greeting card company called Prudent Publishing, whom I still work with from time to time. The process in working with a greeting card company involves working up several comps, which then go into a review meeting. Typically, Prudent Publishing would have some ideas in mind when they'd ask me to generate some comps. So I would quickly paint them up and wait for the review. Sometimes the comps would be approved, and I'd be asked to work one or two of them into fully rendered illustrations. Here are several Christmas/Winter themed comps from several years ago (copyright Prudent Publishing Co.):

Santa! This one never made it to a card, but the comp was really fun to paint!


and below are a few cards that I illustrated:

Spiderwick Nintendo DS background pan

Wow this looks really tiny when I upload it! It is a pan background that I created for a Nintendo DS Spiderwick game while I worked at Backbone Entertainment, in Emeryville. It was such a fun project to work on. It made me a HUGE fan of Tony DiTerlizzi, the illustrator of all the Spiderwick books.

More Learning Company backgrounds

These are all for the Learning Company's, "Strawberry Shortcake", "Reader Rabbit" or "Katie Kadet" cd rom series, painted around 2002, I believe, all in Photoshop.

San Francisco, Reader Rabbit, and The Learning Company

In early 2000, I moved out to San Francisco. When I arrived here, the dot com crash had just about begun, leaving a lot of artists around town clamoring for freelance work. It was not great timing on my part, but despite the struggle, I did not regret moving to this beautiful California city. Most of the freelance work I found the first few years in living here was not local, rather it was either for Calabash back in Chicago, Celluloid Studios in Denver (which was bought by Will Vinton in recent years), greeting card and book illustrations in NYC. I considered going back to school at the Academy of Art in downtown San Francisco, but as it turns out, I was busy juggling various projects from various companies, leaving me little time or money to reinvent my career. I made a choice at this point to continue what I was doing and see where it would lead me. Over time I gradually built up as many freelance projects I could in order to customize my portfolio for the bay area, which is heavy in video game work and film. Try as I might, I finally found some good steady and rewarding freelance work through the Learning Company, who at that time was making educational cd games.

Given that this was still an animation based production, the work flow had a similar pipeline: layout was done by a layout artist, then colored by a colorist, which in this case was me. The drawing was done by [the great] Marcello Vignali. I painted it in Photoshop.

I'm not sure who did this drawing. I colored it, trying to make sure the palette and lighting was consistent from scene to scene.

This is a little spot illustration I did for a Reader Rabbit board game. I wish I could find more samples from this particular project. It was a fun one!

A few Lucky Charms backgrounds

I only have a few backgrounds in my archives from all the Lucky Charms commercials I worked on in the 1990's. Here are a few. As you can see, this style and color palette is very different from the revised and updated palette in the two previous posts.

This background is a four foot long painting used in a pan camera move from left to right. Lucky was flying through the air in this particular scene. I think it took me a week to paint it. Too bad I can't show you a larger version. I think I had scanned it in sections and put it together in Photoshop.

Independent Film projects

While I worked for Calabash Animation in Chicago, I was able to be a part of two independent film projects. Both were really great fun, a chance to blow off steam while making something cool.

One was called, "Heads Will Roll", a spoof on cereal commercials, directed by the incredible Wayne Brejcha. I painted all the backgrounds and designed the color style of characters and other areas of the film. The other project, "Stubble Trouble", was directed by Joe Merideth. "Stubble Trouble" was nominated for an Academy Award. I art directed the film - a great chance to experiment with different techniques and styles than we would normally use.