Charles Talbot
Creative UI/UX Engineer · Ceramic Artist
I work across two disciplines: software and clay. I trained as a ceramic artist — an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, an apprenticeship with Toshiko Takaezu — before moving into engineering, and the two have never fully separated. Today I am a Principal Software Development Engineer at CarGurus, where the same instincts apply: an attention to form, to how a system feels to move through, and a preference for leaving room for imperfection rather than sanding every edge smooth. Sprite Forge, below, is the clearest expression of that right now.
SPRITE FORGE
Active projectA pixel-art hero generator and editor that runs entirely in the browser. Roll a random character from fifteen body types, then paint over it by hand — pencil, fill, mirror painting, undo/redo. Generate a full pose sheet (front, back, side, run, jump) from whatever's on the canvas, export sprite sheets, and keep a gallery of saved designs. No build step, no install — it's a handful of static files.
- Fifteen body-type presets across three colour palettes, including a C64-inspired terminal palette
- A pose sheet that reads colour straight off your edited canvas, not a frozen palette
- A growing cast of hand-designed bosses and NPCs, catalogued alongside the tool itself
Starship Kids
UnreleasedA three-game bundle built in Godot, sharing one hub and one visual world: a Slay-the-Spire-style deckbuilder, a branching escape platformer with a full boss fight, and a dice-driven, choice-based text RPG. Art direction is "HD-2D outlaw" — detailed pixel-art figures, space-western wardrobe, noir lighting.
- Card Crawl — turn-based deckbuilding combat against a run of enemies
- Space Dungeon — an escape platformer with moving/crumbling platforms, a rising hazard, and a telegraphed boss fight
- RPG Adventure — a data-driven narrative with d20 skill checks and branching endings
Concept art from the in-progress asset pipeline, not gameplay screenshots — still mid-playtest and not yet public. A link goes here once it ships.
Projects
Crosshatch Automata
A generative art sketch using cellular-automata rules to build woven crosshatch patterns. 2021 original is archived as-is; crosshatch-automata-live is where it's being continued.
glazer.io
A ceramic glaze recipe library, UMF (Unity Molecular Formula) calculator, and Stull-chart mapper. The long-term goal: describe a glaze in plain language — cone, surface, color — and get back candidate formulas. Early days, and kept private since it holds my own studio recipes and chemistry notes.
Experience
Building React/Redux B2B SaaS applications across mobile and desktop.
Built responsive web applications for higher-education courses. Ran a weekly engineering tech talk.
Full-time immersive program covering JavaScript, Ruby, and test-driven development.
Produced exhibitions for the Philadelphia Clay Art Center and design studio objects alongside the artist.
Taught undergraduate and graduate students material and sculptural concepts in a collaborative studio environment.
Managed studio and collection for the artist, and handled museum correspondence, including with the Okinawa Prefectural Museum.
Studio Council President. Developed an advanced contemporary ceramics practice through studio work and peer-led critique.
Artist statement
By conflicting real or mythic points of origin, traditions of American identity, and personal lineage, my work gathers narrative into an increasingly singular entropic condition. Through abstraction, I examine my place in these histories and distill them into sensations about history.
Exhibitions
- 100 Cups2023Hawthorne, CA
- OPaf 52021Los Angeles, CA
- Brittany: Friends in Gold Country2021Vallejo, CA
- Sunday Night Reels2020Vallejo, CA
- Collective Identity2019Brooklyn, NY
Mostly bootcamp- and early-career-era projects, kept here for the record rather than as current work.