Hi, my name is Rick Lundskow and I love Red Vines and the tv show Fringe.
I wanted to pursue a career in finger-painting when I was five. I was fascinated by the opportunity to get messy and create something that looked… well, not too much better than a blob of poo with poorly-blended colors streaming through the brown mess. My mother broke the news to me that there wasn't much of a market for appendage-brush art. While my career ended prematurely in that department, I always knew that I wanted to pursue art as a profession.
Almost everything that I took interest in as a teenager has shaped my style and skills in graphic design. I owe it all to Tomb Raider: Chronicles which came with a level editor. It was exciting to create complete worlds that I only dreamed about with my favorite protagonist, Lara Croft. The level editor was fun, but I found myself more interested in creating outfits for the young lass. I won quite a few awards for my designs, especially for my Alias outfits. Yes, I'm an avid JJ Abrams fan and took a lot of my inspiration from that television series. This later fueled my interest in Cinema 4d several years later.
I wanted to host my outfits for Lara Croft on my own personal website, yet I didn't know how anything about Html and CSS. After reading several online guides, I learned by hand-coding my first site and eventually started my love affair with Adobe products when I purchased Dreamweaver. Shortly before leaving for college in 2006, I put Lara away along with everything that went with her such as, creating websites in Dreamweaver and designing outfits in Metasequioa (a cad program).
I graduated from Trinity Christian College (TCC) in May 2010 with a BA in Business and a minor in Graphic Design. It's strange how the hobbies that I picked up as a kid, such as taking photos, shooting videos, and creating objects in cad, ended up being a part of what I do today. My Senior year at TCC I took Advanced Graphic Design which heavily involved web design. At that point I wasn't interested in doing web design anymore, yet I wanted an easier semester and the alternative class to web design was less than exciting. I fell in love with designing for the web once again and picked up a few tricks along the way.
I focused my studies in business because I strongly disliked writing (the irony of having a blog) and despised history - both of which were married to an art major. Plus, I wanted to run my own business one day. My blend of business and art allowed me to keep the writing to a minimum and attend the classes that I really wanted to take. I was still required to have two art history courses, but I'm thankful it was only two.
During my Junior year and beyond, I was known as the Mac lab rat, mostly because I spent every waking hour in TCC's Mac lab. I wasn't sure how long I would have access to Adobe programs upon graduation so I took advantage of my resources. In my later years of college, I loved soaking up all the knowledge that I could in all things Adobe. As a result, my grades in my accounting classes were directly affected by it… mostly because I was too busy having fun in After Effects to go to class.
In July of 2012 I was hired as the Art & Media Director at Cornerstone Church out in Highland Michigan. Life in Michigan has been amazing - I've made many new friends and work has been challenging and rewarding.