Earth Day Stamps: Artist's Statement

This year's County Fair closed a couple days ago on the Fourth of July; I now have my ribbons and rosettes in my possession, so I thought I'd blog part of the Artist's Statement I wrote to accompany my blue-ribbon winning Earth Day Stamp Series.

Earth Day Stamps AS

Software:

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; Adobe Acrobat for final presentation and printing

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 a PDF stamp outline template in Illustrator and then opened the palette of my favorite Pantone colors, which I work with most of the time. In Photoshop I opened a jpeg or png of each of the four images I'd chosen, selected a slice of the image and then pasted it onto a layer in the 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, I also unified the group by included a gradient background on each stamp.

For final presentation, I pasted each stamp into a separate layer of a new Illustrator document and then saved it out as a PDF.