Sometimes a dream project just falls into your lap. That’s a special thing, and it happened to me at the start of this year.

It began with the Marketer Collaborative mural. A great project in its own right, and the client was gracious to work with. We were in the early stages, playing with ideas, and the whole thing was about celebrating Cincinnati marketing. That pulled me toward brands and mascots, which got me doing what I love doing anyway, engaging people on Facebook, asking what brands and characters actually resonate with them. For someone who loves character design, it turned into a really fun way to dig into the brands that matter to this city.

So I’m posting, asking questions, befriending people I’ve never met. And one of them was the client.

The client reached out and said he’d had a project in his head for a long time, and he wanted to meet and talk it through. So we met for coffee on a Sunday afternoon in Mount Adams. I was running a bit late. He was already there, with a manila folder sitting on the table in front of him.

The client is a lot of things, but one of his passions is that he’s a food writer and food historian of Cincinnati. What he wanted was to tell his life story through Cincinnati food mascots. And that manila folder was full of it. Heaps of Cincinnati food ephemera, plus a gorgeous little drawing where he’d sketched out every single character he wanted included.

That’s the project I got entrusted with. Telling someone’s life story through icons.

I got into the file and realized there were 33 different elements, all tied together by the Genius of Water, the statue on Fountain Square, because the client gives tours of the square. So we knew what it wanted to be.

The quick way would have been to copy the images he’d already handed me. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make my own rendition of every character. The client, being the understanding patron he is, let me take my time and sketch all 33 myself. So now I’ve got this whole library of Cincinnati characters, drawn in my own hand.

Then I pulled them into a compositional sketch. The client approved it, loved it, told me it went past what he’d pictured. From there we turned it into a dimensional piece.

I like to work in a narrow color field, partly from how I was trained back in high school. Because of that, I wasn’t totally sure the client would be on board with the palette, so I did a little 80% unveiling before it was done. He loved it. I finished it off.

Then I did something I’m glad I did. I’d just had my ice cream exhibition, so I folded a private unveiling for the piece into the show. The client invited the people he wanted there, they all came, and we had this lovely moment around it. The piece now hangs in his house.

And here’s where I’ve landed. I’ve got this beautiful body of work, and I want to take it further. If a project like this speaks to you, a life, a family, a business told through characters, that’s exactly the kind of commission I want more of. Get in touch and let’s talk about it.