Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
There’s two stamps in the series.
The big idea for the domestic stamps came from me thinking about
at the time, Titanic was the biggest man-made moving object on earth.
And that really stuck with me,
you know, this huge object, you know, on its maiden voyage,
was unfortunate enough to hit an ice berg and sink and of course we have a disaster.
So, how do you show that?
How do you get that feeling across?
And so I was imagining standing below her bow and looking up,
which you know gives you that vantage point and perspective of feeling how vast something could be.
That’s where the idea came from. That’s the first thing that went down on my tissue pad.
The design of the international stamp, um, it’s altogether different than the domestic stamps.
What I wanted to show was Titanic looking proud on her maiden voyage,
capturing a little magic hour sunlight.
I wanted the perspective of her to be completely side on,
to juxtapose the front and rear views of the domestic stamps.
And I wanted to create a lot of detail in this stamp so that collectors could really identify things like flags
which are really important to them,
and I actually took the flags from the ship and repeated them on the souvenir sheet,
in the order in which they appear on Titanic when she was on her maiden voyage.
I wanted to show a connection of Titanic to Halifax and so I layered a map in the background,
identified Southmpton where Titanic, you know, started her voyage.
And it shows Halifax.
And this map has a watery visual effect, so it’s not just a flat map.
It gives you a feeling of the North Atlantic when you look at it
and the, the points of Southampton and Halifax identifying.
There is a special ink on the domestic stamps and I haven’t seen this before.
I mean, you know, we’ve used metallic inks before but the way this was layered into the process,
it lays into the shadow areas of the bow and the stern and the propellers of the Titanic
and really gives it a more steely, monolithic feeling when you look at it.
And if you tilt the paper, you tilt the stamp,
you see it, you don’t. It’s really visually quite impactful.
I have to mention the cancel as well
because I really wanted to get the Titanic deck chair into this…
into one of the products because it’s something that sits in the
Maritime Museum of the Atlantic and it’s such a nice connector to Halifax
that I was happy that I made that work in the cancel.
It does have a special meaning.
I would have to say Canada Post bought local in this instance
to hire me to work on this project.
I hope they love it as much as I do.