About This Stamp
In 2009, the U.S. Postal Service will issue four stamps featuring iconic scenes of a Thanksgiving Day Parade, including a lively marching band, large balloons of favorite animals and popular characters, and crowds of delighted onlookers. The four "se-tenant" stamps (a philatelic term describing an attached pair, strip, or block of stamps that differ in design, color, or denomination) will be arranged in five strips on a pane of 20 stamps.
Drawing on the long and rich visual history of Thanksgiving Day parades in the U.S., artist Paul Rogers of Pasadena, California, based his design on American advertising and poster art from the mid 20th century. Rogers used a combination of airbrush and digital medium to create the colorful and nostalgic images featured on the stamps.
Stamp Art Director, Stamp Designer
Howard E. Paine
A member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee before being named an art director in 1981, Howard E. Paine supervised the design of more than 400 U.S. postage stamps. After three decades as an art director for the U.S. Postal Service, he retired in 2011.
For more than 30 years Paine was an art director for the National Geographic Society, where he redesigned National Geographic magazine, developed the children’s magazine, National Geographic World, and designed Explorers Hall. A popular lecturer, he has spoken at Yale University and New York University, among others, and presented programs for the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution. A judge for numerous art shows and design competitions, Paine also taught magazine design at The George Washington University.
Paine had been a stamp collector since childhood. In 2000, he designed the catalog for Pushing The Envelope: The Art of the Postage Stamp, an exhibit of original stamp art at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Howard Paine died on September 13, 2014.