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.

Winter 2010

The last winter has been very mild. In the last 10 years of my experiences with the winter in Canada, 2010 winter was the worst. By the worst means no snow or very little snow. In a way, it is a blessing in disguise for me; I have a slight problem with my left arm and no snow means less thing to do using my arms. Some people are saying that we will have a rather bad summer as a consequence of the mild winter, not enough water will be one of the possible problem.

Water is always a problem. I just read the other day on one of the free paper in Toronto that Canadian are the worst on abusing fresh water. While on other parts of the world people are really having a problem with water shortage, Canadian are using the water to water the garden, grass and washing cars. Ironic, isn't it ?? But in my opinion, there is nothing we can do with the water shortage in some other part of the world. Water is not something that you bring easily to other place, specially in big numbers. Imagine if there is a shortage of fresh water in Africa; what can Canadian do to help them with the abundant water that we have here in Canada ? We can not ship our water to help them. We may be able to help them with other materials like food and clothing, but water ? No possible and it is an astronomical task to bring water across the continent if not impossible.