Rick Kollath’s illustrations make catalogs stand out
If you’ve ever rifled through a Frost River catalog, you’ve seen Rick Kollath’s illustrations.
He’s been drawing and graphic designing for more than 30 years, but it wasn’t the career he set out to.
“The business got started because as a child, I could draw pictures, which is basically a useless skill to have,” Kollath said.
So instead, he got a philosophy degree and then went on to teach German. But that “useless skill” was always there.
“A friend of mine … reintroduced me to Andy Goldfine, who has a business in town called Aerostitch. They make high-tech motorcycle suits,” Kollath said.
He saw an illustration of the motorcycle suits and had some thoughts.
“I literally said, ‘Well, I could do better than that,'” Kollath remembered. “And Andy said, ‘Show me.’ And I did.”
He worked with Aerostitch for about five years and started his illustrating and graphic design business in 1989. But Kollath doesn’t call himself an artist.
“Norman Rockwell complained he was an illustrator. And the deal is, an artist, they want to express themselves. They’re doing this painting to show how they feel about something or to capture the mood they had when they saw this,” he said. “I’m happy for you if you can do that. I just want somebody to tell me what to draw, and then I get to draw that thing. And I don’t care what it is, I just want to draw it.”
His preferred medium is called gouache, a type of watercolor that can layer.
He and a partner also have a publishing company that has put out 20-some field guides, which include Kollath’s illustrations of things like birds, moss, and more.
So what used to seem like an impossibility (“Make money drawing pictures? What? Are you kidding?”) is now in print hundreds of times over.
“I’m happy to come to work every morning. It’s never like Monday morning, where you get up and it’s like, ugh, it’s Monday morning. Ugh. Back to work. No. It’s like, it’s Monday morning! Oh thank heavens, I’m done recreating for the weekend. Time to get back to work. Yay!”