Lunar New Year of the Dragon - Royal Mail

Click on image to enlarge

                                    
The Chinese New Year was celebrated this year with a stamp set that depicted its firework celebrations. But this stamp sheet also had stickers of celebrations from around the UK as well as the five dragon stickers; Metal, Earth, Fire, Wood and Water.

One of the decorative dragons

I was asked to make dragons for the sheet and for the stickers. The decorative dragons were made up of lots of separate layers of scales, but the sticker designs had to be simple enough to shrink down, yet fit comfortably within the sticker format.

My original snap shots of the five dragon stickers are below. These were then professionally photographed to produce more shadow and thus depth for the final artwork.

Earth

Fire

Metal

Water

Wood

The sheet can be purchase here at the Royal Mail shop for the price of £9.50. 

I believe they have gone down extremely well and the client is very pleased.  

Royal Mail Yearbook 2011

Front casing for annual

A Happy New Year for me has brought a copy of the Royal Mail Special Stamps Issue 2011(to give it its correct title). A fortunate year as not only was I asked to design a stamp sheet, I also got to illustrate a section of the book that features the World Wildlife Fund's stamp issue.

Continuous line (starting and finishing at the tiger) made up of endangered species on the
WWF list. Click to enlarge

I was asked by Magpie Studio to work on this project, and it was their idea to have an illuminated letter as an introduction to each section. They also wanted each initial to come together on both the book's casing and its front cover image, to spell out ROYAL MAIL. A total of nine Illustrators were separately commissioned to take on each issue section in order to give the project an eclectic feel.  

The Royal Shakespeare stamp sheet issued in April

The Royal Mail issues an album every year and included in each plush edition is a full set of stamps. The Royal Shakespeare Company stamp sheet I worked on for Hat-trick was issued in April 2011, and so that has a page of its own too!

Layout of WWF page

Detail of the 'M' tiger on cover

The Royal Mail Yearbook is a wonderful album to own. I've had a full-page illustration included before, but more importantly for me it is so wonderful to be involved in the creative side of stamp issues. I've had a lifetime's obsession with these little pieces of divine graphics, as I've collected them avidly since childhood, and British Stamps especially. And for that reason alone I am extremely proud to have the Royal Mail as a client. 


A little more detail (a review) about the yearbook from The World of Stamps website is here.