Year of the Sheep - The Royal Mint

My Paper cut for Lunar Year of the Sheep 2015 coin.

It takes a day to cut out one of these doilies, using a scalpel, from a single sheet of paper. Luckily I have never made a mistake.

How the paper cut appears on the presentation pack

A page showing the progress of a sketch to a stamp.

For the reverse of the pack, I was asked to make little stamp icons for decoration. I made the Chinese character for "year of the sheep" as well as a little sheep from ordinary erasures. The page above shows the progress from sketch to the inking and stamping of the rubber's image, over and over again I cut more away. Eventually I achieve what I want and scan the image to send to the client.

Here is the link to the Royal Mint, Lunar Year of the Sheep 2015 coin 

I did this work with Alice Toosey from Hat-trick as designer.

Lunar Year of the Sheep - Royal Mail Smiler

       

The next lunar new year will be that of the sheep. I really enjoyed making the animals for this one. 

Here are some initial roughs of the layouts. We didn't go with the lambs or placing the animals down the centre in the final design because it looked too cluttered.

Initial thoughts on composition

This looked too crowded

Sheep can vary in breed and we chose to do these with horns to make them appear more decorative. 

I used gold paper for the horns. 

Paper animals with curly wool and golden horns.

For scale: the red paper is approximately A4

This was an early decoration for the centre margin

This sheet is always very visually busy, and part of my brief is to interpret the five elements to each animal for the stickers that accompany the stamps.

Blown up detail of the stickers

2 previous photos curtesy of Alice Tosey, Hat-trick

Graphics are by Alice Tosey, art direction by Gareth Howat at Hat-trick.

Here are the previous lunar years I've collaborated on with Hat-trick for Royal Mail:

Year of the Dragon 2012

Year of the Snake 2013

Year of the Horse 2014