How We Make Our Stickers, and How You Can Make Your Own!
- Stationery By Em
- Feb 13, 2021
- 4 min read
Before we started making stickers, we thought sticker making was super complicated and could only be done commercially or with lots of fancy and expensive equipment. The first time we looked into making stickers at home, we saw fancy printers and cutting machines and immediately turned away.
We started our stationery shop selling greeting cards. We had always been interested in turning our art into stickers, but it seemed too complicated. But after seeing so many amazing sticker shops on social media, we decided to look into it a little more. With a few days of research, we figured out that making stickers is in no way as complicated as it seems!
Making stickers has become something both of us love, so here we are going to simplify the sticker making process for you! Let's start with the essentials:
What you need:
Sticker Paper: This is the most important material for sticker making. As a ground rule, you don't need to buy the most expensive sticker paper, but don't just buy the cheapest one you can find. Our other tip is to buy in bulk. Sticker paper is super expensive when you only buy 10 sheets, but when you buy 100+ sheets, you get a pretty good deal. There are so many kinds of sticker paper, which can get pretty confusing at times. We'll go over a few types of sticker paper to give you some basic understanding:
Matte - This is the most basic of any sticker paper, and for the most part can satisfy all of your needs. It is just like normal printer paper, except you peel of the pack to get your sticker!
Glossy/Waterproof - Glossy paper is usually more expensive than matte paper. We have not used glossy paper, instead we print only on matte sticker paper and laminate the stickers to make them waterproof. Laminating is basically adding a layer of plastic on top of your sticker to protect it from water and smudging. When you buy glossy waterproof paper, this step has already been done for you.
Transparent - Transparent paper is definitely not a necessity, but you can make some pretty cool stickers with it. Some examples of stickers made with transparent paper are our penguin and elephant stickers.
If you are just starting out making stickers, we would recommend buying some matte sticker paper in bulk and then expanding to more types of sticker paper later.
A printer: The 2nd thing you will need is a printer. You don't need a super expensive laser printer, but obviously the nicer your printer is, the better image quality you will have on your stickers. We have access to a laser printer, but it is not in our home. At home we have a standard inkjet printer. The laser printer produces a slightly better image, but we often use the inkjet since it is more convenient. Our inkjet does the job perfectly well, so don't worry about having a laser printer.
A cutting machine: Unless you are planning on cutting all of your stickers by hand with scissors, you are going to want a cutting machine. There are a few different types of machines out there, and I would highly recommend doing some research before you buy.
Nice to have:
Laminator or Self Laminating Sheets: Glossy paper can be expensive and you can save money by waterproofing your stickers at home.
An iPad: Although you can design stickers on your phone or upload them from a physical drawing, it is going to be easiest on an iPad or tablet. The large screen of an iPad makes drawing nice easy.
Sampler sheets: Lots of sticker paper companies will let you try out some different papers for free! I would highly recommend getting a sampler pack from a few different stores to find the sticker paper that works best for you.
Now that you know everything you need, we're going to walk you through a step by step of how we make our stickers!
We design all of our stickers on an iPad. There are lots of different apps you can use to do this, but Procreate is by far the most popular one.
Once we have a good design that we like, we remove the background and export the design as a PNG file.
Now we move from the iPad to a laptop. We cut our stickers with a Silhouette, so we use Silhouette Studio (a laptop app) to arrange all of our designs for printing and cutting. We upload the PNG to Silhouette Studio, resize it, and fit as many of the same design as we can on a page.
Once the design is arranged, we send it to our printer. Make sure to put your sticker paper in the printer facing the right way, or your stickers will print on the back of the sticker paper.
If we are making a waterproof sticker, we will laminate at this point. Laminating is adding a protective plastic layer over your stickers to protect them from weather, water, etc. If you are making planner stickers, there is no need to laminate, but water bottle stickers do better with lamination.
When our stickers are printed and laminated, it's time to cut. As I mentioned, we use a Silhouette machine to cut stickers. Silhouette Studio makes it easy to select where you want your stickers to be cut. You have to play around with the settings a little bit to see what makes the cleanest cut at the right depth, it will depend on your paper.
Once we have everything configures and ready for our Silhouette to cut, we place our sticker paper onto our cutting mat, load it into the machine, and press send. The Silhouette then cuts our stickers for us!
Now we're pretty much all done! We peel back the excess sticker paper and are left with beautiful stickers!
I hope this was helpful (or at least entertaining) for you! Good luck with your own sticker making! Feel free to comment if you have any helpful tips or questions!
Comments