When I got to the illustration side of things in relation to my stamp design I was pretty lost. Every idea I had was simply already designed. I couldn't stick with global warming any more because i didnt see it coming to stamp format , because global warming is huge and making it stamp size backing it with originality wasn't possible for me. I also wanted to keep my stamps irish as country of origin is a very prominant ordeal on stamps. I thought of differant things like the animals on old irish money to the fighting irish symbol. In this picture things were in the very early stages.
I looked towards conservation of species among many other possibilities , dead twocans (the guiness symbol, for irishness) dead from a range of mistakes made by man kind like littering , like 6 pack rings (the plastic that holds cans of beer together ) killing the twocan , choking or whatever to guilt the viewer into being more eco friendly.
keeping it irish , and fighting the burning of fossil fuels or fighting global warming , i thought it was a good idea but i was persuaded away from it for reasons that are obvious to me now.
I carefully researched pages and pages of notes on stamp design to make sure that i got it right , having a slow start with the topic process i needed to make sure that i got it right when i designed my final stamp collection.
Highlighted and written on as proof of study ! :P
I became aware that poster design and stamp design were very different, so many things are to be taken into consideration when working on such a small canvas. minimal type , one main design , scale , can you see what its about without a microscope , minimal colours etc. Not an easy task.
I went back to the drawing board literally and came up with a polar bear idea against global warming. I assumed these simple drawings would make for good stamps after having studied a design guide for stamp design.
It is after this when my good ideas came. I came across something known as phantom loads , basically how much electricity and money is wasted by leaving appliances and the likes on standby. Billions of euro every year worldwide. to convey money loss and promote electricity conservation and saving a few pound i decided that a pocket was a good starting point. Simple shape and colour that was a background or canvas for a message. Standby targets your pocket was born. The stand by sign i felt made an easy object/item for manipulation, i could change it to suit what i wanted to say.
I drew and painted it first but photoshop always wins the battles with my designs m i just like precision and it clearly began to look better as a computer collage than a sketch.
when i had executed a few ideas i became aware that i would have to look closely at typefaces and where to place text on the stamp , and how to draw the viewers attention to a message that needed to be addressed for everyones sake.
Stand by steals your money , another idea ,. By giving the standby sign horns and a tail it was the devil , it was evil and combining evil with a message of steals your money and the pocket i think it grabs a viewers attention, yet remaining simple.
So I had my idea and all that I needed to do was to execute a set of four stamps. This is how they were to look, I changed them a little bit by moving the white text with my message to the top where the standby writing is and vise versa. 
Here is an almost finished example of one of my final stamps.
I also looked at making the set of four stamps with a different kind of pocket keeping my message the same on each "targets your pocket" I found this set to be almost as good as my final design but I decided to go with four denim stamps each one with a different message . Here is the set that I marginallly set aside when choosing my final set.
