National and international birdstamps
Sep 18, 2019
This year the royal Dutch Post, Post NL, released international and national stamps with my bird illustrations. Every year PostEurop, the organization in which all European national post-offices cooperate, organizes an international competition called the EUROPA stamp best design competition. This year, the theme 'national birds' was chosen, and PostNL choose two birds for this competition: "de Putter" (European goldfinch) and "de Pestvogel" (Bohemian Waxwing). Besides that, national stamps with the theme 'Tuinvogels in Nederland' (Dutch garden birds) have been released with six different birds that are well known to most people for visiting gardens and parks.
On April the 23th the international stamps became available for the Dutch market and were launched with a funny Cee app that allowed to scan a stamp and then you would hear the sound of that specific bird. All bird stamps are part of a European project where every country launches its own bird stamps.
I was also invited to participate at the official printing session of the stamps at Royal Johan Enschedé, a High Security Printer on the international market for Stamps, Visas and Tax Labels since 1703. This turned out be a very special experience as we could see how a stamp was made from the first design - with the aid of a scrutinizing look- to the end result: big sheets of stamps.
Designer Yvonne Warmendam of Orange Licensing and myself performing the last quality check.