LAURA STUTZMAN: THE ARTIST BEHIND THE STAMP

Jul. 3, 2008
The United States Postal Service released a new rate stamp on April 18, and local residents may be surprised to learn that the artist who painted the four U.S. flag scenes lives in Mountain Lake Park. Laura Stutzman, a career illustrator, shown at right, was selected to paint the scenes, showing the flag at four times of day: sunrise, noon, sunset, and at night. Stutzman was chosen to do the work by USPS after the selection committee viewed her paintings on her company web site, Eloqui.com, which she hosts with her husband, Mark Stutzman, also an illustrator. She has been established as a prolific painter of American flags, and was therefore hired for the job. The process of selection to product lasted about two years, she said, and involved a number of experiments with varying scenes. She painted the "24/7 theme" with several backgrounds, such as a flag on the porch of a Victorian house and a flag with the Garrett County Courthouse dome and eagle, but the four simplistic sky backgrounds passed the test. Garrett Countians can be proud to note that the skies in the scenes are those of the local area, and the flags were modeled after photos taken of at least one flag from Oakland City Hall. "I really wanted to use the flag at Team One," Stutzman said, "And I studied it for a long time. But it blows perpetually to the north, and it just never was in the right place to allow for good photos for me to use." She also found that the colors at sunrise and sunset are different in different parts of the world, and the final product reflects how the skies look in this neck of the woods. "I surveyed my family to choose the right colors for the right times," she said. "Around here, yellows and purples are sunrise colors, and aqua is sunset. That's not necessarily the case elsewhere." USPS stamp illustration is surprisingly not a new endeavor for the Stutzmans, as Mark was the creator of the famed Elvis stamp in 1993.