Life & Work with Rick Kitagawa of Pasadena

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rick Kitagawa.

Hi Rick, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My first memory of making art was my mom bringing home reams of dot matrix printer paper (the kind with the tear-off sides – this was the 80’s) as her office was switching to laser printers, and so I’d just have endless amounts of paper to draw on with my crayons. I would continue to draw through elementary school, but once I got into middle school, I started leaning heavily into academics, as I was at a feeder school for an International Baccalaureate high school, which I was told would be a pipeline into going to a good university.

Thankfully, once I got to UC Berkeley, I found the Asian American theater club and started going into the performing arts, which led to a lot of writing and performing, which led to me meeting my now-wife, and as we both graduated with degrees in things we didn’t really want to pursue in a bad economy, we decided to go back to art school to pursue visual art.

There I started volunteering to organize the San Francisco Zine Fest, which led me into selling my creations at conventions, which has helped me meet artists of a wide variety of disciplines and mediums, which has helped me explore all of the various mediums I now work in – painting and prints, resin and soft vinyl toys, enamel pins, writing, game and experience design, and my newest interest – mask making.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I think in retrospect, it’s been very smooth if only for all of the help and support I’ve received along the way. I also consider all of the privilege that I’ve had of being able to qualify for student loans, lucky breaks and introductions that have led to other opportunities, and the fact that I’ve had a supportive partner who gets what it means to be an artist and hasn’t killed me yet for making the occasional impulsive, irrational decision.

That said, the road has been and still is a very bumpy one, whether that’s been the never-ending battle against crushing student debt, ego-crushing events like gallery openings with only three friends attending and no work selling, or the years of choosing to buy art supplies over food and missing friends’ weddings and special events because I couldn’t afford to take off work, let alone travel or gifts.

Even now, with the rise of generative AI and the existential threat that brings especially to the creative fields, I don’t think that I’ll ever be struggle-free, but I do think that I’ve been fortunate to have built the resilience and support structures to face whatever’s next.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a multi-hyphenated artist that works in a variety of mediums – from enamel pin design to traditional and digital painting, to designing artist toys, to writing short horror fiction and screenplays, to making weird monster masks and designing tabletop games.

The general thread that ties everything together is monsters and the occult, and my usage of the dark and monstrous as reflections for social ills and structural injustices. Most of my monsters are either reflections of our own inner demons that we should learn to befriend or at least work with, or are powerful instruments of justice that act as my own wish fulfillment that the world was a more fair place.

For example, my soft vinyl toy, Nightmare-Chan, is a fear demon who acts as a helper, as long as you don’t let fear rule over your life. Nightmare-Chan happens to eat fear, and if you start letting fear overwhelm you and dictate poor decisions, he’ll eat you to get to that fear. On the flip side, I’m finishing up work on a table-top roleplaying game about the Sisters of the Dawn – powerful witches who have been marginalized for being women who get to throw fireballs and laser beams at cultists and ICE agents.

I don’t think that any single thing really sets me apart from others, but I’d say that maybe my combination of monsters, social justice issues, and the multi-medium worldbuilding is what makes me unique.

Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
I’m a daily reader of Seth Godin’s blog (even though I strongly disagree with him about AI), as it’s helpful systems level-thinking wrapped up in a marketing lens. I’ve taken my foot off the pedal a bit, but I always appreciate the self-help/personal improvement book here and there, so for books, “Mismatch” by Kat Holmes, “Thanks for the Feedback” by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, and “Choose Yourself” by James Altucher have been all pretty impactful in my life.

I’m also a fan of listening to interviews with other artists, so The Dark Art Society podcast by Chet Zar is pretty dope, and I swear this is not just marketing, but I get a lot of value while I’m editing the podcast I co-host for DesignerCon called Origins: A Creative Journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rickkitagawa.com/links
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/rickkitagawa
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickkitagawa/

Image Credits
All images (c) 2026 Rick Kitagawa