Stamps: historical examples

I am taking a modernist approach to the stamp design. These images speak to my vision.

Clockwise, from top left:
Le Bateau, Henri Matisse, gauche on paper, 1954
This uses line to suggest of movement and atmosphere. It is simple in its construction but intriguing in how the audience must draw from abstraction to see what the image conveys.

Moyra, unknown artist, ink on paper, contemporary
This is suggestive of a figure, and uses only one line.

Le Lanceur de Couteaux, Henri Matisse, paper cut-out, 1947.
This is a study on shape and color. The repeating patterns add unity to the piece, while the figures are suggestive of human forms in motion. Negative space is boldly manipulated.

Sketch for a building, Frank Gehry, ink on paper, 2005.
This line drawing is evocative of built forms in a landscape. The line at the bottom suggests dimension to the landscape, as it comes toward the viewer.

Diagrams for Lovejoy Fountain, Portland, OR, Lawrence Halprin, ink on paper, 1990s.
This is a whimsical diagram which uses strong colors and loose lines to make very specific suggestions about the place and to label what things are. The arrows evoke movement, and the difference between a section view and a perspective, along with their differing scales, allow the viewer to understand the space in multiple dimensions.

Stamps: archive

My three favorite designs among these are:
-The pink butterfly stamp
    The central image is of a pink butterfly, with a factory below it in grayscale.
Its denomination is 50 cents. It is from Israel. It references the environment. I am not sure what year it is from, because the date is written in Hebrew.

-The wheelbarrow stamp
The central image is of a wheelbarrow, silhouetted against an agrarian landscape. Its denomination is 44 cents. It is from the Netherlands. It references inventions, in this case a 'bugaboo'. It is from 2007.

-The cycling stamp
The central image is of several people riding bikes. Its denomination is 50 cents. It is from Italy. It references a cycling race. It is from the year 1967.

version 3.0

This is my final rendition of the design. I made 'contrast' larger and lighter in order to fill up more of the negative space surrounding the world and to create more negative space within the text itself. I made the text lighter than it was because the surrounding text is in a lower key. I also reversed the backwards 'f' of 'flow' to its alphabetically correct position; this invites the eye into the composition.