stamp collection

Design, Illustration, personal project

Celebrating Canadian female Indigenous Artists

This was a self-directed project where I designed and illustrated a set of stamps, as well as a booklet and promotional material, celebrating Canadian female Indigenous artists for an illustration class in my Bachelor of Design.

rationale

I chose this topic because I am a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta.

I am lucky enough that I was able to receive an Indigenous scholarship for this academic school year, and so to honour this privilege I wanted to commemorate Indigenous artists who came before me.

I chose the colour palette based on the colours of the respective paintings.

To create the illustration I included components of all of the paintings to create a landscape. In this way, all of the artists are represented.

I started the project by creating a mood board of all of the artists and their various paintings, but ended up creating the illustration based on one of the paintings in particular.

Originally I wanted to illustrate a portrait of each artist in the style of their work, however after trying a few times I realized that the set of stamps didn’t look cohesive, as it looked as if someone different had designed each stamp.

Instead, I chose to illustrate each artist in a very minimal style, and then design the background and their clothes in a similar way as their own paintings.

ideation

First, I created moodboards based on the artist’s paintings to determine the colour palette and overall style of each stamp.

initial sketches

I then did some sketches of the artist’s likeness and started trying to incorporate their work into the overall composition.

refined sketches

Below are the refined line drawings that would go on to become the basis of the stamp’s design.

refined illustrations

Below is the integration of the line drawings coupled with the simplified illustrated style of each artist.

background illustration

For the stamp booklet I needed something to tie everything together, and to make. cohesive booklet. I decided to try to incorporate all of the elements into a Canadian landscape.