Happy New Year 2018!

ASAD - Jochim #9 (2018) — ASAD – Jochim #9 (2018)

I wanted to wish you, my readers, a very Happy New Year on this first day of 2018. I hope the year ahead brings everyone great happiness.

Instead of researching and putting together another lengthy ASAD article today, I spent much of today simply relaxing and getting caught up on various non-philatelic pursuits. As I don’t return to work until January 3, tomorrow may have a similar result (although there is a topic that intrigues me enough to attempt to pair it with a stamp in order to share it with others).

I did put together a quick “stamp edit” for today’s post, however. I simply cropped-out portions of the denominations on various stamps to illustrate the year “2018” and added a bit of text onto a black stamp outline using PhotoScape, a very handy piece of open-source software that is much easier to use than Adobe Photoshop and my go-to for most image-related projects.

The stamps that I used for the numerals are shown below, as well as the stamp that “provided” the background (I painted out the design).