What do you collect as a philatelist - part 2

As your philatelic collection grow, you will want to have more challenge. Collecting just stamps, FDC, minisheets, SS and all the other material will not be an interesting to do anymore.
In general philatelic is a hobby of collecting something that will never finish, it does not matter how much time you put or how much money you pour into your hobby, you will never get a complete issue of stamps in the world. As you progress with your collection, you will be interest to know more about the advance philatelic material.
I will try to explain as much as possible of what I understand and know about these advise material.

Proof
As we all know, a stamp is produced by using a printing technique. This means that there are several process that will be done before a stamp can be used. On every step of the progress, there is always a confirmation that the progress is acceptable. These confirmation are done by taking a sample of the output from that processes and use them to get the approval. Once the sample is approved, then they can go to the next step. All these are done from the first stage which is the artist drawing until the last printing process. There are various samples and people are collecting this as well because this is part of the history of a stamp.

The Artist Drawing
The first process of the stamp creation is selection of the drawing. These drawing could be the size of the small stamp already, but they also come in a much bigger size. Most of these drawing are hand-drawn by the artist themselves and coloured manually.

Die Proof
Once the drawing has been approved, the next step will be to produce the die for the printing. The printing company normally producing some sort of the printing proof of the die to request whether the picture is already as what owner requested. There are various kind of die proof. The old days, the die proof come in single colour and produced in various different colours. Some of these die proof are also signed by the artist who is drawing them. These die proof can be done on various kind of material and also different kind of combination to explore the possibilities.

Colour Proof & Progressive Colour Proof
The stamps in the modern time are produced by using mostly lithoprinting and recently offset printing has been used as well. The sample of these process are quite different from the one that was established during the old days. Today samples are issued in the form of coloured printing material. The print normally is not a finish print, but a step by step samples of the printing process. So the normal proof in existant today will be in the colour of Yellow, Cyan and Magenta, the combination of two colours and the complete colour minus black and finally the completed stamps without the perforation.

Chromalin Proof (CP)
The chromalin proof is a rather unique proof and very seldom used by the postal office. CP has the appearance of a complete and finished stamp, but it is made of some kind of plastic material. They are produced in the normal stamp size as well. In term of the clarity, the best proof would be the chromalin proof.

Some people called these proof by different name from above, but in reality they are the same. However, the important point is these material are not readily available to public to buy. In some countries, it is even impossible to acquiry their die proof for our collection, some other countries are abundant in the market. The Post Office normally do not sell the proof in their product range. They could be selling some other philatelic material which looks like proof, but it is not the proof that we are talking about.

Black Print
One of the more common material which mistakenly considered as a proof by some people is what they call Black Print. Black Print is a printed stamp in black colour and normally issued by the post office to commemorate a certain celebration. The drawing of the Black Print is the actual drawing of the stamp, but it has no postal value. The misunderstanding is coming from the fact this material is issued by the post office. However this is definitely not a proof as it is understood.