Category: Art

The Hidden!

February 6, 2021

At the risk of making this a stamp blog, here’s another brief post about something I just discovered. I was reading an article in the latest issue of Gibbons Stamp Monthly about phosphor inks used on stamps. Usually this is so the automatic machines can read the stamps, but it’s sometimes for artistic reasons as well. Apparently it used to be more common, but is still occasionally done today.

So I got the 300+ postcards I’ve received from postcrossing and looked at them under a UV light. Here’s what I found:

Many Russian stamps contain these phosphorescent ‘threads’ embedded in the stamp. They don’t seem to have any sort of pattern and I can’t discern their use for identification or artistic reasons. Even stranger I saw many cases of the same stamps either having or not having them. Weird.

Most Finnish stamps bear a silhouette of the country which, under UV light, is overprinted with the euro sign!

Here’s a Chinese stamp with a hidden UV element connecting various parts of the art. You can also see a number printed in phosphorescent ink on the stamp. This is very common in Chinese stamps, and I don’t know if it is done when the stamp is printed or as some sort of cancellation after mailed.

Cleverly, the UK Sherlock stamp series from a few years ago overprinted a series of words much like how the show used a similar method to show Sherlocks thoughts. As you can see the words are not very vibrant in the above pic, and this may be because the stamp is older. I found for instance that in the case of Russian stamps the ‘threads’ were more distinct on newer stamps so perhaps the inks fade over time?

The best example – by far – that I found on the postcards I checked were on these Chinese stamps, on which you can see the skeletons overprinted in red phosphorescent ink under UV light. It’s extremely clear and crisp, and looks amazingly good. This was actually the very first postcard I shone the light on, and I was both astonished by what I saw and very excited to see what I’d find on others. Alas I soon discovered the UV overprints were rare indeed and never as flashy as this one.

So if you have a UV light and a bunch of older postcards why not shine it on them and see what you can see? There may be a few hidden secrets you missed the first time around 🙂

The New Jigsaw

January 18, 2021

I love jigsaws made by a company named Pintoo. The pieces are plastic and fit together with barely an atom between them. The finished puzzles look great and you could easily frame and display them.

I’ve bought a lot by this company and given several as gifts. I think 500 to 800 pieces is an ideal puzzle size, but recently I got a 2000 piece puzzle:

This is a lot of pieces, and all spread out barely fit on our table:

Pintoo puzzles lack flat edge pieces so making the border is much more difficult than in other puzzles. In this case, sorting the pieces and making the border took me over 4 hours!

Finishing the entire puzzle took me 24.5 hours over ten days!! Here’s an animation of the puzzle after each work session:

Its a lovely puzzle and was a lot of fun to assemble. But I think it’ll be a while before I tackle one of this size again!

2020 in Postcards

December 28, 2020

We all know what didn’t happen this year: travel. And no travel (usually) means no postcards. But as you may know I found ways around that, and this past year ended up being a strong one on the postcard front!

When I visited Australia/Japan late last year and early this year I sent Kristin about 50 (yes fifty) postcards, four of which are shown above. As usual these are mostly amusing travelogues and I’m already thankful I did them since they contain slice-of-life memories that have already faded! Here’s an example of what I wrote on one from Japan:

Of course the last card from Japan (sent on January 20) was the last card I sent in 2020 while I was actually on holiday somewhere.

Then a friend (thanks JK!) made me some postcards for my birthday! This was perhaps a better gift even than she realized, because immediately I decided to use the same service (moo.com) to start making my own.

And I’ve made hundreds! Most of you have received some in the mail, and a few of you are receiving them weekly! This is in part due to covid, and in part due to me enjoying sending postcards. I hope you are enjoying receiving them.

Happily I’ve been receiving cards as well, and the above is a selection. Even if none of you are traveling either, you’re still sending me cards which is great. Every time I find one in my letterbox I smile 🙂

And then there’s postcrossing as well. I only check my PO Box every few weeks but every time I do there’s a pile of cards in there and I’m very close to receiving my 300th card! Covid is still slowing the mail for many countries, but even if delayed the cards eventually arrive and I haven’t had a single one ‘lost’ during 2020. Understandably the vast majority of cards contain comments about covid, and I can assure you people all over the world are hoping we get through this soon.

My latest idea was to purchase some ‘vintage’ US Stamps (some examples above) to use on postcards, and I’m just about to start doing that. Even though US stamps are good forever I’m still going to test this before sending a bunch of cards, but I’m optimistic you can look forward to cards with 30+ year old stamps on them soon…

Of course I hope 2021 brings travel back, and I can once again go somewhere and send you tacky tourist postcards. But even if that can’t happen I’ve got enough cards to keep me going for a good long while, and enough ideas to keep them fresh. Watch your mailboxes!

Robot Claw