Since I've posted the Earth Stamps I'm submitting to the County Fair on this blog and the real one on sun country living, I decided I could use my Artist's Statement as fodder for this blog.
Assignment
To design a single stamp or a series of postage stamps.
Software
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; Adobe Acrobat for final presentation.
Concept
With Earth Day on the horizon, I looked through my digitized analog art and chose some favorites. Each design illustrates an aspect of humanity’s stewardship of creation: a small wood frame house along the beach; young plants growing up strong out of healthy soil and into the sun; a city abounding with healthy trees and gleaming in the sunlight; laundry hung up to dry in the sunny air on the roofs of an inner-city apartment building.
Process
For each individual stamp, I started by opening the PDF stamp outline template in Illustrator; I then opened the palette of my favorite Pantone colors. In Photoshop I opened a jpeg or png of each image I’d selected, selected a small slice of the image and pasted it into a layer in my Illustrator file. For the denomination (55¢), USA and my domain name, suntreeriver dot com, I used the same font, Cooper Black, on all the stamps.
Although each image was a different size, to unify the group, I also included a gradient background.
Outcome
I created a series of four stamps in the dimensions of the template we received. Two are vertical, two horizontal. For final presentation, I copied and pasted all the stamps into a separate Illustrator document and then saved it out as a PDF.
