Relief, or relievo rilievo, is a sculptural technique. The term relief is from the Latin verb levo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane. What is actually performed when a relief is cut in from a flat surface of stone or wood is a lowering of the field, leaving the unsculpted parts seemingly raised. The technique involves considerable chiselling away of the background, which is a time-consuming exercise with little artistic effect if the lowered background is left plain, as is often the case. On the other hand, a relief saves forming the rear of a subject, and is less fragile and more securely fixed than a sculpture in the round, especially one of a standing figure where the ankles are a potential weak point, especially in stone. In other materials such as metal, clay, plaster stucco, ceramics or papier-mache the form can be just added to or raised up from the background, and monumental bronze reliefs are made by casting.

Thomas Blackshear is an African American artist, many of whose paintings adorn Evangelical churches. He is also a sculptor and a designer of ornaments, often of African American themes.

Blackshear designed illustrations for numerous postage stamps issued by the United States Postal Service (USPS), including four in the Black Heritage stamp series:

A touring exhibit of his Black Heritage works premiered in 1992 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Other U.S. postage stamps with Blackshear illustrations include portraits of Joe Louis, Jelly Roll Morton and Thelonious Monk for the Jazz Series, and illustrations for stamps commemorating James Cagney, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Beau Geste and Stagecoach for the Classic Hollywood Movies series, as well as several stamps for Classic Movie Monsters. He also illustrated the USPS book I Have A Dream: A Collection of Black Americans on U.S. Postage Stamps (1991).