Finished (For Now) My 1851-57 3c Washington Study

I posted an earlier version of the first page or two a while back. I redid the pages as a result of some of the advice here. I also got PF certs for the premium shades (all came back favorable!).

Many of these stamps are ex-Amonette and/or ex-Chase. Some are from actual color charts. Some have hand-written notes from Amonette. Some are from elsewhere. I plated a few of these myself - and several had help from the forum here - thank you!

I still need a pinkish. . .

And my 4 perforated stamps are a little sad compared to the scope of the imperfs. I will need to find some reference stamps somewhere to do a half-decent shade study on the perforates.

I am puzzled by one feature of the mounting. When I look at a particular grouping in a line, I see no rhyme or reason to the order in which the individual stamps appear. Just looking at the very first line, the 1851 orange brown, they are not by type or plate or any other discernible feature. Am I missing something?

They are mounted lighter to darker. The colors do not come through very will with the low-quality <200kb scans, but I think you can still tell that the stamps on the left of a group are lighter than the ones on the right (at least for most of the groupings). The types and plates are incidental, but I did want to show some interesting recutting varieties. I also went out of my way to get some interesting cancels.

Thank you very much for sharing this. It is very interesting to see your color study, also because there are not many examples like this available in the internet (articles, auction sales, websites). But yes, it's not really easy to get an idea of the colors with the SCF 200KB size. Maybe there will a way to show your images on an image host site and link them here? But another question: are there some stamps where you are note sure about the colors and that are not certified and have not old signature on the back? Just to know.

I am ignorant of the finer points of US philately,
however that presentation is a real delight to view, for me.
Philately towards the highest level.
Well done.

Care to share how long it has taken you, to this stage?

I think it's a great presentation, how did you print your pages?

I too think the presentation is fantastic. Thank you for sharing and it should inspire others to post there stamps. I will reorder some of mine and put them up for comments.

The most amazing thing is that the PF concurred on all of the shades. Awesome!

Philazilla, Agreed, the light to dark did not immediately come across. It might be good to have some short introductory text explaining the hows and whys of all these colors and the subtleties of the light to dark arrangement. And yes, because everyone sees color differently, I agree with the direction stamperix is going, I would indicate the certificates somehow (a small dot?) and the items with connections to Chase or Amonette (perhaps something as simple as ex-C or ex-A).

I'm about as confident as I can be on the colors. 90%+ of these stamps were color-identified by Amonette or Chase. Chase being the original expert on this stamp, and Amonette being his #1 student, and one of only a couple recognized "color experts" in US philately. The stamps that are not straight from Amonette or Chase collections, are either common colors or have a PF certificate. All the rarer shades have 2019 PF certificates. All (but one) are plated, and the plates match to known colors of the stamps. There may be a mistake or two, but a more likely problem than mis-identified shades is that some of them are not ideal copies of the particular shades. The Intense OB is a bad stamp with an altered pen cancel. The "early use" EOB has an overpowering blue cancel. A couple others are muddy or dry printings which can alter the apparent shade.

This has taken about a year to assemble. I bought the Amonette-identified stamps from two different collectors/sellers (I bid on, but did not win the Amonette color study that came up at auction a couple months ago - it went for stupid money). I bought several other shade collections and interesting individual stamps that did not have any kind of provenance for material to compare.

I make my own pages with Adobe InDesign.

If Don thinks these pages would be a fit for stampsmarter, I could provide higher-resolution scans, and details (provenance, certs) on each stamp. It is unlikely that I would put up a website myself for these.

Very nice. You've obviously learned a lot about the stamp from this exercise.

I also had a plate 2L and 3 orange brown.
Those are tough to come by. My 2L was on cover and I want to say it was mid 52, but my memory fails me a bit here.

To use these as a color reference you "might" have to pull them out of the mounts from time to time to avoid interference from the mount for the color. That was why Bill used hinges. Very nice to see your collection.

One of the challenges with assembling a collection like this is keeping track of the stamps and staying organized, since the stamps all look the same. Here's what I did: I made copies of each stamp along with any accompanying notes for a hard copy. I made a hi-resolution scan of each stamp and gave each one an index number. I tracked the details of each stamp in a spreadsheet. I sorted the stamps on vario pages, each with a stamp-sized accompanying tag identifying the index number, plate position (or relief and other info if not het plated) and color or tentative color. I can't imagine trying to plate these stamps without high-resolution scans. I can imagine Chase squinting through a magnifying glass for hours a day - not a fun thing to do.

One thing I realized early is that scanning on a white vs black background makes a big difference in the scanned color. I redid all my scans on white backgrounds, but the stamps are mounted with black mounts, making them look slightly darker and less bright than they would on white. I can see why Bill used hinges.

Wow! Fantastic work!

Any thoughts on slipping a piece of white paper behind the stamps? I could also switch to clear mounts either on white pages or white cut-out backgrounds.

What a beautiful set of stamps! Nice work. My preference is for black mounts, but it might be worth experimenting with slips of white paper behind the stamps. Might provide an additional layer of framing for the stamps. Anyway, whatever you decide, thanks so much for sharing this with us!