Everybody loves stickers, right? As a kid I’d collected them for a sticker book or to put on my space case. Later, my tool box with all my art materials at varsity got covered. Today, it’s my laptop that gets decorated with them. Making stickers when I decided to do art full time became an important start for me in learning about digital painting and diversifying my products. I thought I’d take you through my process and how you can make your own custom stickers too.
First, why stickers?
A self-portrait. Photo by eff_tea_pee
When I really started learning illustration, it was all mixed media on paper and canvas for me. The work wasn’t all that good… it was terrible actually. I damn near invented an imaginary twin when I last looked at those old attempts at drawing, blaming him and not me for such atrocities against the eyeballs.
Gradually I improved a bit and wanted to explore the digital side of things, which I was clueless about. I was really struggling financially at the time too which was another reason to explore other ways of making. I still managed to keep a sense of humor about my situation and channeled that into some ink drawings. They were stupid caricatures of either pigeons I had to walk past daily to my studio, or of myself sustained by instant noodles and cheap box wine. Later I thought they could make for fun stickers and I could use them to get a feel for digital colouring of my sketches. And so my first pack of 15 stickers came out in 2016. They weren’t great, but I learned a lot. My friends supported and bought my stickers, and I enjoyed making them, so I made more.
So today, they serve two main functions for me:
One, they offer a welcomed relief from the more serious digital and traditional paintings I do. Doom and gloom kinda motivate my paintings, but with stickers, it’s LOLs and middle fingers. Balance… the spice of Life.
Two, not everyone is able to buy prints or original artworks, but stickers are affordable and fun. Some people still actually collect them, which I think is awesome. Skateboards and BMXes still look better bombed with them. And sitting at a coffee shop, I always get excited to chat about some of my favourite artists to people when they point out one of the stickers on my laptop.
I really recommend this 4-part miniseries from Juxtapoz Magazine about sticker culture and what really got people into it.
Right, so let’s get drawing…
The first part is obviously the initial drawing. A LOT of my stickers were conceived during month-long challenges like Inktober and March Of Robots. I prefer to start with pen on paper, sitting over the lightbox and redrawing if tweaks need to be made, before scanning in to the computer. Of course you could draw from scratch digitally too if that is quicker and more comfortable for you.
Scan and color
I always scan at 300dpi, but if your scanner can only do 150 – 200, that is also fine. The first thing I do after scanning, is drop my image in Photoshop to desaturate (sometimes the inks have a blue tone to them), and improve the contrast, but I don’t jump to drawing just yet.
To neaten up the lines, I take this image over into Illustrator to do an image trace, and then drag it back over to Photoshop. Depending on how detailed your drawing is, you might loose some of that in the trace, but this step isn’t all that necessary in the first place. This is just how I get a little added neatness.
Now, in most drawing programs you should have the option to set your line art layer mode to Multiply and that’s as much as you need to get on with drawing on layers beneath that.
However, if you need to separate your line art, in Photoshop, there are a few ways to go about it. I mention those in a basic video below in case you aren’t sure how to do this.
When it comes to colouring, depending on the complexity of the design, I’ll approach it like this:
- Fill out the flat, base colours
- Add in textures, if any, on a separate layer
- Add shadows, usually a cold colour, on a separate layer set to Multiply. I tend to drop the opacity of the layer quite a bit too. Maybe add a second layer for deeper shadows.
- Add lighting, usually a warm colour, on a separate layer set to Overlay. Adjust layer opacity if needs be.
- On a final layer, add in any strong, sharp highlights
Once you are done, you might want to Save, then flatten your layers. Then I’d selected my white background, erase it, and then save the image as a PNG. Now you are ready for the printing.
Ink on paper drawing first. 
Base colours 
Light and shadow
Printing options…
So there are a few options for printing your stickers: at home, at your local print shop, or through an online service.
At Home:
Two things you’ll need for this are obviously a suitable printer, and the sticker paper or vinyl.
In terms of printers, you could go with something like the Canon Pixma MG3620 inkjet printer. On the higher end, there’s the Canon Pixma Pro-100 inkjet, which I’d also recommend for doing your own art prints as it can do borderless printing and has a high print resolution.
If you don’t want to be cutting your stickers by hand, you can even get yourself a machine to handle that for you, such as the Silhouette Cameo 4 Plus 15″.
Your local print shop
In my case, I place all my stickers on a standard international paper size sheet (usually A3 or A2), and submit that to my printer. Because of the relatively small quantities I print at a time, I decide to cut things myself once the sheets are ready. For an additional fee, and if I supplied the cut lines, their machine would do that for me. Chat with you printer about how best to give them your designs too. Some might prefer the individual design and what quantity of that you want.
Online sticker printing services
Sticker Mule is one I’d recommend. They do a range of different sticker types including glossy, matte, holographic, and have different cut options. They even do magnets and buttons.
The eco-friendly options?
This is something I’ve been wanting to change, because as much as I love stickers, they aren’t the most eco-friendly product. I try to go for durable options for my stickers so that at the very least they last long and don’t easily wash off a surface and into the environment. The peel-and-throw-away backing really irritates me though. THIS POST by Clarify Green gives a nice brief overview of more eco-friendly options and companies you could use.
ECO Enclose is one not mentioned there that looks to have a great variety of products to make sure your sticker business has as low an impact as possible, from the stickers themselves to the packaging and mailers.
You’re all set…
I hope you found this post helpful, and are inspired to make some stickers of your own. I’d love to know what your favourite stickers are and where you like to stick them up, so drop a comment and let me know.
Happy drawing!
Full disclosure… This post does include some affiliate links, so as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to keep me producing more art and content like this for you.
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