Christmas Stamps 2019

Alan Dunne designed a set of six stamps for An Post featuring depictions of various Christmas themes using papercraft illustrations that result in very distinctive finished imagery, resembling a theatrical set scene. Based on ‘Sending Love’ and ‘Community & Christmas Traditions’, four €1 stamps feature: carol singers’ charity fundraising, community sea swimming, the Holy Family journeying across Egypt and posting Christmas cards to loved ones; two €1.70 stamps have the Star of Bethlehem and the

traditional Irish language greeting, ‘Nollaig Shona’.

The process involved in designing the stamps involved creating sketched scenes, pre-visualising these on the computer, then cutting out the designs in coloured paper and positioning them into layered scenes similar to theatrical sets before lighting and photography were used to achieve the final effect. To highlight the growing popularity of charity and community events in Ireland at Christmastime, one of the stamps features a scene depicting a community sea swimming event in Galway Bay. This event last year attracted over 1,000 swimmers, who braved the cold to raise much-needed funds for charity.