United Nations International Year Of Quinoa Stamp Design

At the start  of the year I was one of some recent graduates of UNISA who submitted designs to commemorate the United Nations International year of Quinoa. The aim was to promote quinoa as a super food as it is jam packed full of nutrition and also to honour the custodians of the grain, the Andean peoples who have grown it for thousands of years.

This was the rationale for my design:

"This design connects with the origins of quinoa as a food from the Andean region where it was known as the "queen of the grains." I felt it was very important to acknowledge the indigenous nature of the quinoa and the region it traditionally comes from as people are very dependent on it's production for their own food source and it has been given to the rest of the world from there.

I have represented my idea of an Incan sun wearing a head-dress which is made up of sun-rays and also the quinoa seed- head/plant. The face of the sun  looks benign rather than fearsome to represent the health-giving quality of quinoa. The face could be construed as male or female in which case it could be seen as a queen (as in "queen of the grains").

The sun face is shaped as a "Q". The name quinoa is often mispronounced (the name sounds like it starts with a "K) so I wrote "Q" is for Quinoa on the head-dress. This gives authority to quinoa as it now becomes the word associated with the letter "Q".

The image and the colours are very bright and graphic as the image needs to be read easily when it is small. Blue represents clear Andean skies.

The letter "Q" is filled with seeds/grains of quinoa in lots of different colours as the plant colour is very diverse and colourful."

ideas about composition

 

colour ideas

final rendering

 My design was one of the 8 shortlisted and because of this we got the opportunity to go to Government House in June and receive a certificate from the His Excellency the Governor of South Australia, Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce.

Recently were were invited to the UN Annual Dinner at the beautiful National Wine Centre in Adelaide to see which designs had been made into stamps and happily all of them were!

This is my design. 

The stamps are only available on a limited release through the Adelaide Office of the United Nations. 57/81 Carrington Street, Adelaide SA 5000

We discovered that even though we all thought we were pronouncing quinoa as keen-wa we were wrong. The Chilean musicians attending the dinner told us it was actually pronounced keen-o-a. Glad we got that sorted out.