Unknown bulgarian award

[Greg Collins]

I know a little about this process as it is what I did for more than a few years. What you are looking at is "final artwork" for a proposed medal. What lead to this was many rough sketches that had to go through the approval process- some being "nixed" right off the bat; elements of some others being kept. Once all elements have been decided on, a finished drawing is produced and duplicated so that all the decision makers will have a copy. Then the decision will be made of whether or not to go to production. This is, I believe, what we're looking at here. Apparently, this particular medal never made the cut. A lot of work goes into producing a medal or badge to this point alone, and we haven't even made it to the die-making process yet. And it is still done this way today, although the computer has helped to speed up the process.