Matt Bowen, Engraver

“The reverse features a single large leaf designed to hold the viewer’s attention, and that’s why I took such care with every detail. We knew from the start that we wanted a leafy field pattern, so I arranged the outline shapes around the text and the leaf of honour in a way that wouldn’t compete too strongly. A coin of this size (102 mm) has to be made as a direct die, which means working entirely by hand on the die in the negative—far more challenging than our usual process of cutting in the negative, hobbling a punch, and then fine-tuning the positive image. All this to say, a kilo coin requires special care to produce the master tooling before sending it off to the laser for the frosted field pattern. But it’s always exciting to work on a kilo coin—the sheer size of it is daunting—and I always get a great feeling from producing a piece defined by one of Canada’s national symbols.”