Last night was a great night for Richter Studios , a Chicago based video production company.  The two brothers who started it, Jeremy and Dave Richter, have wanted to get into motion pictures.  Last night's premiere at the Gorton Community Center, in Lake Forest Illinois, they saw the friuts of a three year endeavor.  A sold out crowd stood in ovation after 2 hours of diving into how this big little north Chicago town affected and was affected by history.  Discovering Deerpath , a docu-drama, pulled into the story of settling men who tamed the west, upheld ideals of education and abolition, and used all that they had been blessed with to lift up a community.

 Anyway, as my wife and I were leaving the nearby Starbucks, we saw the poster I'd done on their community wall. My excitement built.  As we walked back to our car we saw flood lights shining up into the clowds signalling that something important was going on.  My excitement grew.  We made our way over to the Gorton Community Center and walked inside to be greeted by a red carpet and excitement.  Geez i got more excited. I found all the other studio blokes who'd worked on the film and we got to pump eachother's excitement up a bunch of notches.  I'll share some pictures later, but for now here's the poster.

The crew responsible for Discovering Deerpath enjoy a photosession in the theatre seating.

Over the past few months I have been working with Jeremy Richter, co-head of Richter Studios, doing poster and interior illustrations for the movie they are currently working on. It's a documentary on Lake Forest, Illinois -- a northern suburb of Chicago. The range of styles and subject matter of the illustrations has made the project challenging and continually ineresting. Working with the crew at Richter studios is always a blast.  Especially Jessica Duenke who's an amazing animator and illustrator.

Check out DiscoveringDeerpath.com to see the trailer to get a taste of the Richter talent and get a glimpse of my illustration in action.

So things are going well.  I've had the pleasure of working with a new client who wanted to update her persona/avatar as she's getting a site overhaul.

Miss Motor Mouth is a blogger out of California who's words travel about the automotive industry, national car shows and the like. She needed an image in her likeness that represented her.  I don't do a lot of charicatures but I was able to work through a few styles with her and came up with a great little cartoon head that's reminiscent of the jetsons.  What I had hoped to achieve by going that route, was making a commentary on how progressive it is that she has come so far in what is a male dominated subject. 

The funniest part about the project is that just before I finished, she chopped off all of her curly hair so I had to put the character in a new hairstyle, quick. We both thought that the end result hit what she was looking for.  Thanks Michelle!

Check out the branding section to see more...

So not only have I been working steadily in my 7th month after jumping freelance fulltime, but I've had the chance to work with some really great people on some very different projects than I'm used to. Richter Studios has had me in working on a few of their accounts ranging from Nielsen, a global provider of marketing information, to Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), the company behind the Got Milk and Real campaigns. But all in all I'm being challenged and definitely feel like I'm growing in my aptitude for graphic design. In this, my 7th month, I am 100% affirmed that I made the right choice.

Here is the style sample we submitted to DMI. Check it out in the Illustration section.