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

Lunar New Year of the Snake Smiler - Royal Mail

Happy New Year!

Following the success of last year's smiler sheet Lunar NewYear of the Dragon, which got a second print run within two weeks, I was very kindly asked to do the illustrations for this year's; Lunar New Year of the Snake. Bright and colourful it is too! 

Media used: coloured paper.

Water

Wood

Fire

Earth

Metal

Detail

I worked with Graphic Designer, Alex Jurvar at Hat-trick on this project.

You can buy the stamp sheet from Royal Mail or at a post office.

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.