Homemade Sticker Sheets and Small Art Journalling

When I first went into the gift shop in our village to see if they wanted to become stockists of my homemade cards, the owner said to me that once I had a design I could put that design on many different products. This, of course, was a great idea. Almost immediately I used my whale design to make a blank notebook, a dotted notebook, a lined notebook, a graphed notebook and an alternating lined and blank notebook. I intend to do the same with each of my other designs. The next thing I thought I would turn my hand to is creating homemade sticker sheets using elements of my designs.

Small Art Journalling

I create about one design per month in my A5 art journal, working on the design most days. It is these designs which will make the backbone of my homemade sticker sheets. However, I have found that sometimes the sticker sheets need bulking out a little and this is where my small art journalling comes into place.

My small moleskin art journal is A6 in size, and contains lovely thick watercolour paper. My goal is to do a single object watercolour each day and then use it to add to my homemade sticker sheets as and when necessary. I started this week:

These are quick sketches which take half an hour or so. I am then able to isolate them, remove the back ground and create tiny stickers to go into my homemade sticker sheet.

Making a Homemade Sticker Sheet

Creating the Base Sheet

In order to make my homemade sticker sheet, I head over to my favourite design website, Canva. All my sticker sheets will be A6 size, so I create the basis of the sheet using that sized canvas and my own brand colours and name:

As you can see, this sticker sheet will contain all my meadow themed stickers. I am using different colours for my ocean themed (blue), safari themed (dark red) and Woodland (orange).

Isolating the Elements

For this I use Procreate on my iPad. The first thing I do is duplicate the design many times:

Clicking on one of the duplicates, I crop the element I want to isolate:

Once cropped, I add another layer and then start to white out the background:

In this case, I wanted to keep both the turtle and the bubbles so I kept going until only these remained:

Next, I airdrop it into my Mac and upload it to Canva. In Canva, I remove the background and create a translucent image:

This image is now ready to put into may homemade sticker sheet:

I do the same to all the other elements and end up with a homemade sticker sheet that I can send to the printers:

Using the Small Journal Sketches to Fill in a Sticker Sheet

Am thinking that this post would have been better if I had just used the meadow stickers. But Gary’s parents are over from Northern Ireland and I’m rushing…so for some reason I’ve done the ocean stickers. My point was to show my small journal art and how I’ll be using that in the sticker sheets. So I just do this quickly here. I apologise for the lack of cohesion. Here is the meadow sticker sheet and you can see the placement of some elements that were not in my original designs that I have drawn individually:

What do you think? Do you think they’ll make a nice addition to my stock?