Jacob Johnson

Jacob Johnson is currently the Senior Environment Artist at FireSky. He grew up all over the US…moving back and forth from state to state due to his mother’s job. He usually says that he is from the San Francisco Bay Area, because he was born in Hayward CA. He calls Castro Valley CA home because it’s where they always seemed to end up.

Over the years he dabbed into many mediums of art; painting, photography, and sculpture. In High School, he was a shop nut. Always working on cars and building things with wood and metal. It wasn’t long before he discovered welding, and he loved it. Soon he began making things in the shop out of molten steel and casting small sculptures from sand molds. He got involved with an off campus program offered to juniors who were interested in learning a trade skill. He chose welding and wanted to become a sculptor, making the huge structures you sometimes see in front of office buildings and in parks. After two years of taking this welding course, and graduating top of his class, he was well on my way to becoming what he wanted to be. But he soon realized that he was not living up to my true potential. So he decided a week before High School graduation to move to Monterey CA. From there he dabbed into computers and graphic arts, creating little slogans and logos. He wanted to become a graphic artist and enrolled into ITT Technical Institute in Hayward CA, taking courses in Illustrator and Photoshop, as well as HTML editing programs.

He then looked into other colleges and found an art school in Phoenix AZ. The Art Institute is where he made his home. He enrolled in their Game Art and Design program, wanting to become a concept artist. He eventually found his love for environment art half way through his college career. He was soon learning the Unreal editor and making levels and environments of his own.

After college he got a job offer from Nintendo and moved to Austin Texas to work with Todd Keller and Andrew Jones on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, at Retro Studios. After Metroid he left the studio and joined FireSky to work on Stargate: Resistance.