Illustrating Canada’s 49 National Parks: My Travel Stamps Story

In early 2024, I stood admiring a display of illustrated Travel Stamps in the gift shop of the Volcanoes National Park Visitor Centre on the Big Island of Hawaii. I had no idea that stop was about to lead to a project that would have me illustrating all forty-nine Canadian National Parks.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A Promise Made Around a Campfire

Let me rewind to 2001, when our children were young and our family spent many happy summers camping. One evening around a campfire, my husband and I made a promise to our future selves. We decided that for our thirtieth wedding anniversary — still sixteen years away — we would buy an RV and head out on the open road.

When 2017 finally arrived, we couldn’t imagine ourselves as RVers. We were far too young! But after much debating, we decided to honour the promise we had made years earlier and bought a used 24-foot motorhome.

Our plan was simple: travel across southern Canada and the northern United States to the Maritimes, visit a few national parks along the way, arrive in Halifax, sell the RV, and fly home. We were willing to give RV travel a try, but we were convinced it wouldn’t be for us.

We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Within days we discovered the unexpected luxury of having our own little home wherever we went. Our clothes hung in closets instead of living in suitcases. We slept in our own bed with our own pillows. We always had food in the fridge and a bathroom just a few steps away. It felt less like camping and more like travelling with a comfortable hotel suite that happened to have wheels.

By the time we reached Halifax — after travelling through eight provinces, nine states, and visiting seven national parks — we weren’t ready to part with our RV. Instead, we tucked it into a storage facility, flew home, and returned five months later to continue exploring. We travelled that way until COVID temporarily brought our adventures to a halt.

Since then, we’ve resumed our travels and now own a slightly larger 27-foot RV. To date, we’ve visited every Canadian province except one (the territories are still waiting for us), all but six U.S. states, twelve of Canada’s forty-nine National Parks, and nineteen of the sixty-three U.S. National Parks. Our goal over the next few years is to visit every Canadian national park that can be reached by road.

The Gift Shop That Changed Everything

That brings us back to Hawaii.

While my very thorough husband read every detail explaining how the Hawaiian Islands were formed, I wandered into the Visitor Centre gift shop. There, I stopped in front of a display unlike anything I had seen before.

The Travel Stamps company had created beautifully illustrated collectible stamps for each U.S. National Park, along with a keepsake book where visitors could record the dates of their trips and place each stamp as they visited a park.

It was, quite simply, a grown-up sticker book.

I hugged the book against my chest and announced that I absolutely needed one. My husband laughed at how excited I was.

At the time, I thought that was the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

One Simple Email

Although I’m best known for my large-scale acrylic floral paintings, my background is in graphic design. Over the years, I had taught myself digital illustration, but I had never had an opportunity to develop those skills very far. Ever since working with a professional digital artist while preparing my Canada Post stamp proposal and my Royal Canadian Mint coin proposal in 2015, I had hoped that one day I might explore that world more seriously.

Back at our condo that evening, I happily flipped through my new book, making a list of the stamps we would need to collect on future trips.

Eventually, I found myself wondering whether a Canadian edition existed.

A quick search suggested it didn’t.

So I sent the company a simple email asking if they had ever considered creating one.

That one email led to another.

And another.

Before long, I somehow found myself being asked to illustrate all forty-nine Canadian National Parks.

Even now, writing those words still feels a little surreal.

Since then, I’ve spent countless hours researching Canada’s National Parks, studying the landscapes, wildlife, and iconic features that make each one unique. Every illustration begins with the same question: If someone has only one image to represent this park, what should it be?

It’s very different from painting flowers, yet surprisingly similar. Both require careful observation, thoughtful simplification, and an appreciation for the beauty found in nature. One happens on a large acrylic canvas, the other on a digital artboard, but the creative process isn’t nearly as different as you might think.

Looking Back

Looking back, it’s remarkable how many seemingly unrelated moments had to line up to make this project possible: a promise made around a campfire more than twenty years ago, an RV we were certain we would sell after one trip, a visit to a gift shop in Hawaii, and a single email sent out of curiosity.

None of those moments felt especially important at the time.

Yet together, they led to one of the most enjoyable and unexpected projects of my career.

I’ll continue sharing my Canadian National Park stamp illustrations on Instagram, along with updates on when the Canadian Travel Stamps collection book becomes available.

In the meantime, you can explore the Travel Stamps website to see where this all began. And if you would like to see where my own artistic journey started, I invite you to browse my gallery of large-scale acrylic floral paintings — the artwork that somehow led me here, too.