Cover Art

Postage Stamp Prints

Linocut Prints, 12" x 16.75" and 12" x 12", Alanna Sadeghian

Alanna Sadeghian ’15 has always been intrigued by unique stamps. But they became especially significant when she began writing letters to her husband while he was at U.S. Marine Corps boot camp.

“We couldn’t decorate the letters,” she says, “so I started buying cool stamps instead” — Navy war ships, or comic-book characters. As the couple wrote letters, Sadeghian learned her grandmother also had a longtime interest in stamp collecting.

For her stamp-inspired senior show at the Seattle Pacific University Art Center this spring, Sadeghian chose to depict locations meaningful to her family. Her dad lives in Port Orchard, and Camp Pendleton (near San Onofre beach) is where she and her husband shared their first home. Her family has also inspired her art career — as a kid, she dabbled in printmaking with her art-teacher mom.

To create these linoleum-block prints, Sadeghian hand-etches a sketched design into the soft, porous linoleum, then presses the print by hand. She relishes the thick lines and interesting textures the printing process creates.

“I’ve always been a fine artist, but I’ve had kind of a graphic style,” she says.

Through her senior art show, Sadeghian, a studio art major, has sold a few pieces and received requests for custom prints. She never anticipated a career in fine art (she’s been working full time as a graphic designer while finishing her degree), but, she says, “The show made me realize I actually could make a living as an artist.”