Original Artist Drawing

On the left is one of the rarest item in philatelic world. It is the original artist drawing.
As I have said somewhere on my earlier posting; the stamps are produced through several different processes. One of the earlier process will be the artist drawing. There are various kind of artist drawing in the stamp world. One of them is the pencil drawing like the one on the left. The actual drawing itself is bigger than the normal stamp. Once the draft of the picture is approved, the next step would be to put colours on the drawing to make it more presentable. Normally there is only one artist drawing for each individual stamp, but there are cases where more than one artist drawings are being produced to give the project director more views of what can be expected from the stamp. I've seen some artist drawings which consist of several different kind of drawings on a certain subject in different views and colours. Ultimately the director will choose one drawing and it will go through the next steps.

Eventhough, original artist drawing is very rare, the value in monetary term is not always high. I think it depends on whether the actual stamps itself become a favourite or not in the market. I've never heard a famous original artist drawing that will draw high interest among the philatelists and most of the time, a beginner in stamp collection will not understand what original artist drawing is for. However, if you want to become a serious stamp collector, you should at least have one of this type of material in your collection.