Back in February 2020, I was approached to design and illustrate the 8th May 2021 Lundy Stamp issue. I had just finished a set of paintings featuring the Lundy rental properties, which had been turned into postcards & delivered to the Lundy store ready for the 2020 summer season (who knew), so I was still very much in the Lundy zone and keen to get involved.
Lars Liwendahl, Lundy’s long standing philatelic adviser, was due for a brief stopover in London on his way from Stockholm to Lundy, so at the beginning of March 2020 we grabbed the opportunity to meet in person and discussed the project at length over coffee in Tate Britain. Although I have worked to commission for many years, this was my first foray into designing artwork for stamps.
The brief was to produce a set of six stamps to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Lundy Field Society. Lars had already worked out that he wanted illustrations to run across the full width of each pair of stamps. This made a tricky job even more complicated as the image had to work as a whole, but also as individual left and right hand sides. The aim of the issue was to showcase activities undertaken by the LFS voluntary group, including research & education of the island’s history, natural history and archaeology, plus the conservation of its wildlife. In a nutshell, stamps are tiny but there was a lot to cram in!
The first pair of stamps featured a panorama taking in Marisco Castle and the entire dramatic coastline looking up the East side of the island. I had recently spent time drawing on the island back in October 2019, but I planned to revisit for this project, to make sketches and take references photos of the specific views required. But then Covid swept in and all plans changed.
Supplied photo and photocopies
Instead I found myself digging through my own archive of photos & sketches from previous visits, and Lars was able to supply a number of images gathered from various sources too. Between them all I cobbled together enough information to sketch out the view, albeit with a fair degree of artistic licence in order for the composition to work within its stretched proportions.
The next task was to add people to the scene, all taking part in activities. Photos were helpfully emailed from the island to indicate the size of a figure at various points in the landscape, although I did modify scale slightly to ensure they would be clearly visible once dramatically reduced in size.
Once Lars & I were happy with the composition of the landscape I digitised the pencil sketch and used Adobe Photoshop to arrange figures in the scene. I made numerous individual sketches of people, sometimes asking my family to pose for me. My immediate family all appear in this illustration, although my kids are now 19 & 16 so I referenced photos from when they were much younger! I scanned all these sketches and added each one to a separate Photoshop layer. This enabled me to quickly move, scale and flip, avoiding endless laborious redraws. In the end the file comprised of 43 layers - all variations on a theme!
My computer screen shows my design process and the many Photoshop layers I used to compose the first two stamps
The final version in black and white. Spot the difference with the final stamp design!
Once the digital composition was finalised I redrew the scene in pencil and emailed it to Lars for approval. Then I started the watercolour. At 57cm wide, the painting was many times larger than the 8.4cm it would eventually end up, so I had to ensure the figures would stand out against the landscape when reduced to only a few millimetres high. I wanted to avoid giving everything a black outline, I device I’d seen used on other stamps, so instead dressed the figures in an array of bright colours in the hope they would show up sufficiently against the natural greens & greys behind. Full colour adds another level of complexity! Lars had initially asked for the sky to be a perfectly summer blue, but I persuaded him to embrace a few clouds. The sky occupies a significant proportion of the page and I wanted to give it a bit of interest. This project was very much a collaboration, and I think Lars and I worked well together, via email and telephone, to get to a point that we and ultimately the client were happy.
Final version of the 65 Puffin pair of stamps (denominations crossed out as requested by Lars.)
Given the repeated lockdowns over the past 14 months, it was extremely handy that I am married to a photographer, specifically one with over 30 years experience photographing works of art. He shot my final illustrations on a Hasselblad camera, giving me superb quality 150mb images to work with. I was able to layout the stamps in Indesign and add the extra high resolution tiff files specified. After transferring print ready PDFs to the specialist printer in France I realised I’d been able to complete the entire job without needing to leave my South London studio!
In my next post - design of the 90 Puffin pair of stamps…
