Giancola Art Featured on Two New Space Stamps

The U.S. Postal service has released two commemorative stamps illustrated by Hugo-winning artist Donato Giancola. One celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mercury Project astronaut Alan Shepard’s 1961 flight. The other honors NASA’s unmanned MESSENGER spacecraft, which has made two flybys of Venus and three of Mercury since it was launched in 2004.  

Giancola described how the work was done to a reporter for the New York Daily News:

Giancola created small oil paintings for each of them, which were scanned and transformed into stamps by post office designers.

The whole process took about nine months.

“When you’re creating art that’s going to be a historical record like these stamps, there’s no room for mistakes,” said Giancola.

“You’ve got to make sure you get the details right. It’s a lot of work – but totally worth it,” he said.

Giancola’s website is here.

Donato Giancola with his painting of Alan Shepard.

[Thanks to Michael J Walsh for the story.]

2 thoughts on “Giancola Art Featured on Two New Space Stamps

  1. Messenger also went into orbit of Mercury this month, the first spaceship ever to do so… first human spaceship, anyway.

  2. Remember when a previous set of space-art stamps by Steve Hickman won the Hugo for Best Original Artwork? Good times … back when there was a Hugo for Best Original Artwork.

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