Whale Mail—Postage Stamps from Across the Seas

This year marks my forth year of creating calendars—something I have dreamed of doing for a long time, but kept talking myself out of because it felt like too big a project. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so intimidating if I created a calendar using work I already made… but I have grown to look forward to working on this project all year! It means I get to carve out time to work on 12 new artworks, not necessarily connected to anything else I am doing, and create paintings purely because they make me smile.

This year’s theme is postage stamps. I have always loved letter mail and, as someone who also enjoys travel, I find stamps fascinating because they are little snippets from a specific place and time. It’s a little personal touch from the place of origin. I was inspired by the idea of whales writing to each other across various seas, and imagined what would be on those stamps. Each stamp I created holds little clues about some of the whales that live in that sea.

12 Featured Sea Stamps

Salish Sea	Labrador Sea	Arabian Sea	Coral Sea
White Sea	Beaufort Sea	Philippine Sea	Mediterranean Sea
Weddell Sea	Saragossa Sea	Irish Sea	Sea of Cortez

In progress Snapshots from my Studio

This year is by far the most ambitious collection of illustrations I have made yet! Each painting takes many hours of work to complete. What I love about stamps is that they are often complex, with lost of little details… so of course I allowed my detail-orientated brain to go nuts on these paintings.

Why a Postcard Calendar?

I enjoy making calendars that are re-useable. So I came up with the postcard idea because I realized I had a stack of old calendars that I really liked but didn’t know what to do with. My postcard calendar is loose-leaf, and at the end of the month, you can turn over the page, cut along the dotted line, and the calendar page turns into a real life postcard that you can send in the mail. I love hearing how people have been using them and turning these calendars into activity projects: from using it as a special way to stay connected with grandchildren, to encouraging kids to write letters, and taking inspiration from the artwork to write short fiction stories about the whale on the cover 🙂