All You Need is Love and 49 cents
Ellis Alumna Designs 2014 Love Stamp for U.S. Postal Service
An illustration by Elizabeth “Q.” EDDY Cassetti ’75 now graces the upper right hand corner of love letters, wedding invitations, and business correspondence across the country. Her design, known as The Cut Paper Heart, is the latest in the popular LOVE stamp series launched in 1973. Back then, a stamp cost just 8 cents and Q. was an Ellis sophomore.
An illustration by Elizabeth “Q.” EDDY Cassetti ’75 now graces the upper right hand corner of love letters, wedding invitations, and business correspondence across the country. Her design, known as The Cut Paper Heart, is the latest in the popular LOVE stamp series launched in 1973. Back then, a stamp cost just 8 cents and Q. was an Ellis sophomore.
“If anyone ever tells you that you can’t make a living as an artist, don’t listen to them!” Q. affirms from her home in New York’s Finger Lakes. She runs Luckystone Partners and has an impressive client list that includes Corning Museum of Glass, Cornell University, Tiffany and Company, Estee Lauder, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The New Yorker magazine. Her work has also appeared in dozens of juried shows, art exhibitions, and catalogues.
The intersection of art and the Internet is what first brought her to the attention of the Postal Service. Q. began using social media and other online tools to share the art she was creating as part of her graduate studies.
She had been working as an artist since earning her B.F.A. in design from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. “I went back to graduate school at age 46 because I was feeling stale as a graphic designer. I picked illustration because in college I was told never to consider illustration, so I figured now was he time to do it,” Q. says. In 2007 she received a master’s of arts in illustration from Syracuse University and in 2009 she earned a master’s of fine arts in illustration from Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford.
Graduate school was, as Q. puts it, “a whole new world.” Her classmates included illustrators for MAD magazine and video game designers whose work influenced her approach. She began developing an entirely new digital graphic style using Adobe Illustrator. She created bold and deeply emotional graphics inspired by Mexican and early American funeral rituals. “It was my attempt, when I turned 50, to draw my way out of death,” Q. says. But when her advisor said “no-go” to these works for her thesis, she found inspiration in the sketch books she had been keeping since age 3.
There she rediscovered her love of valentines. She soon created a series of 15 hand-drawn hearts, which attracted a following on her blog. The site became a place for her to explore the thinking behind her art, which she had not fully articulated until she started blogging about the work. One of Q.’s followers was Antonio Alcalá from Studio A in Arlington, VA, who just happened to be an art director for the post office.
“The Postal Service found me online and the rest is history,” Q. recalls. “Truly, it has been the most joyful design project I’ve ever done because they gave me a great deal of creative freedom.” But the challenge was creating a design that would “read” when rendered in a 1-inch-square space.
Q. took inspiration from Mexican papel picado cut-paper flags, Chinese paper-cutting traditions, the German scherenschnitten paper-cutting practice that was popular in 18th and 19th century America, and bucolic Swiss paper-cut drawings of cows. “Think Heidi,” Q. says.
To this day, Q. still thinks about how Ellis has influenced her career and work as an artist. “In school, both undergraduate and graduate, I was one of the few women at the table,” she says. “This continues through my professional life. Having the ‘girl power’ experience at Ellis saved me time later because I wasn’t concerned with social perceptions about being a girl. Ellis gave us permission to think of women’s issues but also to transcend them, compete, and take our deserved seat at the table.”
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The intersection of art and the Internet is what first brought her to the attention of the Postal Service. Q. began using social media and other online tools to share the art she was creating as part of her graduate studies.
She had been working as an artist since earning her B.F.A. in design from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. “I went back to graduate school at age 46 because I was feeling stale as a graphic designer. I picked illustration because in college I was told never to consider illustration, so I figured now was he time to do it,” Q. says. In 2007 she received a master’s of arts in illustration from Syracuse University and in 2009 she earned a master’s of fine arts in illustration from Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford.
Graduate school was, as Q. puts it, “a whole new world.” Her classmates included illustrators for MAD magazine and video game designers whose work influenced her approach. She began developing an entirely new digital graphic style using Adobe Illustrator. She created bold and deeply emotional graphics inspired by Mexican and early American funeral rituals. “It was my attempt, when I turned 50, to draw my way out of death,” Q. says. But when her advisor said “no-go” to these works for her thesis, she found inspiration in the sketch books she had been keeping since age 3.
There she rediscovered her love of valentines. She soon created a series of 15 hand-drawn hearts, which attracted a following on her blog. The site became a place for her to explore the thinking behind her art, which she had not fully articulated until she started blogging about the work. One of Q.’s followers was Antonio Alcalá from Studio A in Arlington, VA, who just happened to be an art director for the post office.
“The Postal Service found me online and the rest is history,” Q. recalls. “Truly, it has been the most joyful design project I’ve ever done because they gave me a great deal of creative freedom.” But the challenge was creating a design that would “read” when rendered in a 1-inch-square space.
Q. took inspiration from Mexican papel picado cut-paper flags, Chinese paper-cutting traditions, the German scherenschnitten paper-cutting practice that was popular in 18th and 19th century America, and bucolic Swiss paper-cut drawings of cows. “Think Heidi,” Q. says.
To this day, Q. still thinks about how Ellis has influenced her career and work as an artist. “In school, both undergraduate and graduate, I was one of the few women at the table,” she says. “This continues through my professional life. Having the ‘girl power’ experience at Ellis saved me time later because I wasn’t concerned with social perceptions about being a girl. Ellis gave us permission to think of women’s issues but also to transcend them, compete, and take our deserved seat at the table.”
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