♫ [happy classical piano] Hi friends, hello. Happy Monday. So today I am frantically trying to get my stickers ready and ordered, so that I will have them for my holiday update, which is hopefully going to be happening on Sunday, November 10th Fingers crossed! [exhales through lips] I don't know if y'all saw, but I was unfortunately totally out of commission, pretty much for the last two weeks of October, because I had colitis not the chronic kind (thankfully), but that's what they called it, because a very particular part of my intestine was infected and I had to be on antibiotics and I got a CT scan and I had to get a colonoscopy and like, all this stuff but Everything is normal, which is great. I'm fine now, but I was basically useless from like, the 15th of October Because unfortunately gut health is also very closely tied to mental health and I also hadn't been taking my Prozac because I hadn't been on— because I'd been on antibiotics and I didn't know if, like, it was gonna mess with them and I basically was also just so tired and fatigued that I just forgot to take my meds and It was that combined with the fact that I was like scared to eat because I didn't know if stuff was gonna like wreck my body and Just a whole slew of stuff meant that I didn't get anything done. Like I was supposed to. I was supposed to have everything ordered by like the end of the third week of October like all my stickers and everything ordered so everything would arrive in time and I would have like plenty of time to do a shop update, even potentially this past weekend but that didn't happen because I was very ill. So basically I've just been playing catch-up. So today I have been frantically preparing my sticker sheets because I want to order them all in bulk obviously and I'm gonna do a rush order so that they arrive but I wanted to talk y'all through the process of how I format my sticker sheets, really! I've already drawn up all my sticker designs already. So I draw my sticker designs in Procreate, I will probably do a more—my coloring style in Procreate has updated since my last Draw With Me, So I will probably doing a video update on that. But essentially, I draw all of my sticker sheets just like in a file on Procreate. I do it usually in about probably like a 5" by 7". I do not worry about the formatting or the spacing here, I pretty much just sketch on one layer, color on another and then I will import the transparent PNG with no background. I will export that file and I'll airdrop it to my computer and so you can see here: this is the finished product that we're gonna be working towards, but this is— I've been adding so many things. Let's see here...So, like these are my unformatted stickers. So for instance, these are the tea time stickers that I have, and this is what I import onto my computer. You can see they're on a transparent background And so I will import these, air drop them into my downloads folder, put them where they need to go, and then I will open them up in Photoshop. Which is gonna... open now...just give it a minute. So here I've opened it up in Photoshop now. As you can see, it's on a transparent background and I actually wanted another little, like, vase of flowers, so I went in on Procreate and drew another one and then added that into this file So what I do here, I will usually mess with the curves a little bit. And so I usually will maybe brighten them up ever so slightly, or I'll bring this value down to kind of like saturate and make the colors a little bit richer, but I've already done that so I don't need to do it again. And then I will go in and sharpen things. Again, I've already done this so I will go in and sharpen just because the pen that I use, or the brush that I use on Procreate is very texture-y, and I like to sharpen it just once to make it a little bit crisper. So everything is not quite so soft around the edges. I also tend to find that like with the particular brushes that I use sharpening just helps clarify the texture a little bit more. I could be totally wrong, I could totally just be talking out of my butt. But this is what I do! This is my process. Also this particular sticker sheet is going to be printed on clear paper So this is something that I've already done which is what this layer is, but what I will go in and do because it's gonna be on clear paper and I want to make sure that the integrity of the designs isn't lost too much. People are mostly going to be using these on like probably white or ivory journal paper, but just to save the sort of texture of the design and the way things show up I will go in with my magic wand tool here and I'll select the empty space and then I hit command + shift + I to inverse that selection and from here, I will go into Select > Modify > Contract and I'll contract by probably about like what 3 pixels? So that way if we zoom in here, you can see that the selection is on the inside of the outlines just like ever so slightly So I'll do that and then I will go Select, again, Modify, and I will Feather By like again, like two pixels just to soften up the edges and then from here I'll go in, take my paint bucket tool, make sure that your foreground color is white. Oh, no. And then you want to make a new layer underneath the artwork layer and fill it in white. As you can see, I forgot to deselect the areas like around the tea cup handles and stuff So we're gonna hit command Z to undo that, go in with the magic wand tool with the little deselect option here and then oh, my bad. I'm on the empty layer again. So—no, stahp. Okay so now I go in and deselect all that space.These, because we're doing it after we already did the contraction and the feathering, these are probably gonna have to go in and erase a bit once we like get rid of the space but that is A-okay. That's the problem with drawing teacups, there's lots of little lots of little bits and bobs to keep in mind. Um, okay great. So that looks good. So now we can go back to our Paint bucket tool and the plain layer, fill that in white. And you can see, a very slightly different. So if I undo You can see especially here on this chocolate cake. Connor just texted me, hi, baby! You can see here on this chocolate cake that it's a little, eehhh, just looks a little too see-through. So when we fill it in with the white it just pumps up the opaqueness while keeping the texture and so now that I know that whatever surface these clear stickers are stuck on they will look great. And then you hit command + D to deselect and That's that! And so, like I said, I've already kind of—I've done the finessing and everything that I needed to on this bottom layer here along with this new one. So, what I will do when it comes to moving my designs over from this Photoshop file to an Illustrator file as you can see I've already done this here, but for learning's sake, we're gonna start fresh! So I will go File > New from Template and then I have a blank sticker sheet template that I have made for Illustrator I will open up this new file in Illustrator, and this is a template that I made that is 4"x6" which is what my sticker sheet sizes are and it has my logo in the middle top of the page so that way I know it's in the same place on every single sticker sheet, and I don't have to worry about that. So we have this new little piece of art and we're gonna name this first layer "artwork" and then we're gonna go into Photoshop This is a very tedious bit. Now, what I do is I use the lasso tool to draw around each sticker design and then I hit W for the wand tool and again, it has the little like minus sign and I will click in the space that I want to get rid of so that it just selects the little sticker art. Hit command + C to copy, pop over to Illustrator, command + V to paste. So now I have this little guy! And so I will do that with every single little individual sticker thing on here. So, again, select with the lasso tool minus with the wand, copy and~ paste! So I will just do that over and over again until I have all of the sticker designs pasted like I do on here, and then I usually spend a long time rearranging, resizing, all that kind of stuff. Again, this is my sticker page without any of the embellishments that I normally do. I will go in and fill like little awkward gaps with little sparkles and things just to kind of fill out the page but this is the arrangement that I went with. These were two sticker designs that I didn't care that much about and so I don't mind that they're on here that they're not on here I do rather like the little rose tea thing but I don't know where I want to put that because it looks weird in this space... Do I want to just get rid of the mugs? See, this is the problem. So if we move that and then we may put this here? Aw, that does look cute though. Oooh, but I want a mug! I want my little yellow mug. These are the decisions we must make as...artists. So, yeah, that's pretty cute but I really like the mugs. I will probably keep the mugs. I could change my mind. It could be different from the time that you see this video. So this is how we have it, like, formatted. Have it all arranged. This is how I want it to look. And now, before I can go in and do my little embellishments, I'm going to go in and do my cutlines! So, VinylDisorder can do like, will happily do your cutlines for you, but just because I'm very finicky and a lot of my artwork is, again, my stickers are very close together I don't want there to be a lot of unnecessary back and forth with them of me asking them to adjust the cutlines when I could just send them a file with the cutlines already in place. We're gonna make cut lines. This is a technique that I learned from the illustrious Jordan Clark. <3 Thank you lover!! I've also been watching a lot of Bernadette Banner. (Is that her last name?) But she's a dress historian on YouTube and she's amazing and I've just been watching her videos and she speaks so eloquently it blows my mind. Anyway, I digress. So, we're gonna go here in Illustrator make a new layer, we're gonna name this layer "cutline", and then you are going to select all of these little precious artworks. You're going to command + C to copy, you're gonna select your new cutline layer, hit command + V to paste. Now you're gonna get to go in and do this very finicky thing to make sure that they line up as properly as possible. May not be perfect, but... Should be pretty good. That looks pretty good to me. First I go in—just because I make my cut lines magenta, and magenta and red are very similar, So I go in and change the color of this to green. So now what we're gonna do is go one by one—the reason why I cut, this is the reason why I pasted in all of these designs individually. One, so they're easy to move around and resize and two, for this purpose. Select your design, make sure you're on your top cutline layer. You're gonna hit Image Trace And it's going to turn into this little thing. You're going to open up your Image Trace window, which you can also open by clicking this little button up here, or your Image Trace panel, I should say. We're gonna open up Advanced, hit Ignore White (first things first), and then for your threshold, you're gonna put it up to like... 254 basically, so this becomes super opaque And, I don't know why it's so like.. Usually that's pretty much the only thing I change. I change the threshold to be a really high number like, 254, 250 And then I will hit Ignore White. And then you go to Expand, go Object > Path > Offset Path. And then I will usually do for my sticker sheets probably around like, .05 inches? We're gonna preview that see what that looks like. That's a little too small I worry that the machines — I worry that the sticker cutting machine will get confused. So I'll usually do maybe like point 0.065 inches? See how that looks? Yeah, so that's... reasonable. One of the great things that I love about VinylDisorder—so a lot of sticker companies will require like a minimum amount of space between like, between images on a sticker sheet, so that way they have a little bit of allowance when it comes to cutting Normally on clear sticker sheets, whatever company you use, that allowance doesn't matter just because They can get—with clear sticker sheets, the lines don't have to be as precise as maybe opaque ones, and so any company can get like all fiddly but What I like about VinylDiisorder is that I—even on my opaque designs like here I have some pretty tight cutlines that they're able to adhere to which I really like. So we're gonna go with 0.065. You want to make sure that your joints are round so that way it's all nice and smooth. Uh, I don't know what this means. I've just always left it at 4 and it's been fine. So we hit OK So now we have this little outline. You're gonna go to your Fill, make it transparent, you're gonna go to your Outline, make it pink, make it go down to about 0.25, and then you're gonna double click to isolate this top layer and double click again, delete this little centerpiece, and now we have a cutline! So we have the cutline on one layer and then we have the artwork on another layer underneath it. And now, what I'll do is I'll go in and adjust... and so this is just really tedious but very necessary work. It's super boring. There's nothing glamorous about it. It's very fiddly, but it's necessary and it saves me a lot of back-and-forth with my production company. I guess if you make stickers using a Silhouette machine, this is basically the Illustrator way of making like Silhouette cutlines without using the Silhouette Studio programming. So again, thank you to Jordan Clark for teaching me how to do this. I am still very scared of Illustrator as a program, but Jordan has a really great handle on it and she has sort of opened my eyes to the wonders of Incorporating it into my workflow and it's really made such a huge difference. So I'll usually go and I will adjust some of the anchor points. I usually delete a few, round out a few, because sometimes just because, again, the texture of the brush that I use is very scratchy sometimes the path will pick that up and become unnecessarily jagged so I will go in and clean it up. So that's one down! So now I do that for all the rest of them. So, I will see you then. Also, my battery's about to die, so this is a perfect time for a segue! ♫ [happy classical music] fun fact this footage is sped up to 1000% as i said, it's a slow-going process tbh it's kinda fun to watch back at this speed tho And we're back! So I would say it's probably been about.. 20, 25 minutes since we last spoke? But anyway! So, As you can see here, I have my little all my cutlines figured out, and so now what we're gonna do is go in and add all my little sparkle things. So, I take this, with the cutline visible, go into File > Export, I think it is... Export As? Yes, Export As > You're gonna, you're gonna choose PNG. You're gonna hit "use artboards", and i'm just gonna go ahead and actually save this to my little sticker folder, so... holiday 19, tea time.. ...cutlines. Right? Yeah, "teatime cutlines." Okay great, so Save that there, you want to choose it with the PNG option. You're using the artboard so it gets this border I'm gonna go ahead and do transparent background. We're gonna go "OK"! Cool. So now I have that file over here It's right here, all good looking. And now what we do—so now we're gonna go into here. We're gonna go Share > Airdrop, We are going to airdrop this file to my iPad right here. Waiting... And then we're gonna jump to my iPad and here it is! So again, if I tap on it, it's got the transparent background, but what we're gonna do... is we are going to go into Procreate. As you can see, this is the raw...file with all the other little designs and then this was a design that I added on last minute, but this is the file. So, I have my sketch layer here, and then I have my colors and all that good stuff. So we're gonna focus on that another day. So for right now, we are going to pop over into— we're doing all this stuff in October. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna hit Photo Recents, tap on this thing that I just imported and then it adds in the white background for me, which is great, and then you want to make sure you select a new layer. And then I'm gonna go in and pick this like, nice Yummy yellow that I love and I'm gonna go in with the Narinder Pencil probably like a 60%? Yeah, that's good. So now, because I have the cutlines I know where those are gonna be, so now I basically just go in and fill in the empty bits with sparkles and things! And this just helps sort of fill out the space a little bit more. This is also just a me thing just because I don't like having too much, I don't like having that much empty space on my sticker sheets. I'm definitely like, a bit of a maximalist in terms of my design work. Basically just go in, add little—my little sparkles or my little kind of like exclamation point things that I like to do And I try to make sure to spread it out pretty evenly like across the whole sheet. Obviously some spaces are better for it than others. Some spaces are just a little too tight, but even in that case, I'll try and add just like some little accent lines or a sparkle or something. There we go! Yeah, so as you can see the sparkles—this is again, just a me thing, But I like the way that it fills out the space. Yeah, so we're gonna do that so now we get rid of the background and the little thing And then we again export as a PNG to maintain the transparent background, we go ahead and drop that onto my Mac... and now it's gonna airport, airdrop and now— we're back on my computer! This is one of the reasons why I have everything Apple, just because it makes my workflow way easier, so I don't have to email stuff back and forth I can just airdrop it and it just makes makes steps like this in my process just go way faster. So great. So now I have that Airdropped. So what we're gonna do is that we're gonna be on our sticker sheet layer here I'm gonna go into my Downloads where it showed up—Untitled Artwork 28 PNG. That's what it is. Drop it in on top, and then, we want to make—because this is already 4" x 6". So we're gonna go in and hit it Horizontal Align Center, Horizontal Align Vertical. Oh. It's not 4x6? Weird. Okay, so we're just gonna go four...by six. There we go. So now, it's perfect! And if I wanted to, I could even get rid of the cutline to see how it looks like without the cutline, but I mean the cutlines are gonna be there on the paper, so people may not see them a lot but they will see them. And then sometimes here I'll go in and be like, "Oh, This could go like right here. So I will go in to Photoshop, And I will take these little things and I will select them and I will add them in one by one. Because I would rather do this than have to go in and Airdrop it back and forth yet another time. So I'll just go in and add this in and it's a little It's a little finicky, but honestly, it's less of a headache than having two Confident having to redo the whole hold kit and caboodle — the, the whole process. I also hope that the things that I am saying make sense? I feel a little bit like I'm not entirely lucid just because of how stressed I've been the past couple days. So I hope the things that I'm saying are making sense. when I order stickers from VinylDisorder or StickerApp, or whoever I'm ordering stickers from, I will just send them the AI file or the Illustrator file as is, because then that way they have the cutline layer, and the artwork layer. So I'm actually going to rename this "artwork" instead of "sticker sheet." So, um, I'm gonna hit command + s to save all of our hard work and [clap] That's how I fomat my sticker sheets. And then I order them from VinylDisorder. They take about a week and a half to get in, and then I get lovely little beautiful sticker sheets like this one. So this is the process! Again, I will do a tutorial on my like updated coloring method that I've been using in Procreate recently. I'm going to email this, along with a bunch of other sticker designs, and get those ordered, so that way I can have a shop update this weekend, hopefully. [guh] [GUH] I'm stressed, but I'm okay. I had therapy this morning which went, which was really really great I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which has been DELIGHTFUL. [delighted laugh] I've never played like a turn-based strategy RPG like that before, so. Been having the time of my life! It's so much fun. And there's so much to think about! And it's so involved. I've also just started playing Luigi's Mansion 3, which is so fun. Also Connor just started playing Breath of the Wild. It's his first ever Zelda game and, um he's getting the hang of it! He's on the grand—he's on the Great Plateau. Figuring his way around and I have to work so hard not to like, tell him what to do, or tell him how to do things, or how to go about things. I have to let him figure it out. Watching him play it ,akes me wish that I could play that game for the first time again. What I would give to be able to play that game for the first time again. I've been stressed. I've been good. Sophie is cute and soft and wonderful and I talked to my therapist today and basically, I'm gonna be working my ass off for the next month and then I'm essentially going to take the entire month of January off, and I'm very excited about it. So I'm working with that like, big proper break in mind and I cannot wait. But yeah, so my shop update will be happening this Sunday November 10th, I'm gonna be having like some clay little pin clay friend things. I'll be having some original work, a couple new sticker things, and some cool fun new products! Unfortunately, I—I'm not gonna have washi tape because...I know I talked about that in my last video but the washi tape is not gonna get here probably until the end of November, so I will probably wait to post that like on my shop until the springtime. And hopefully by that time, I will also be ordering other thing of washi tape. And I also, I will have an enamel pin, I will have an enamel pin It'll probably be a pre-order thing because I don't think that that will arrive until probably Maybe the end of next week? I'm not sure, but that'll be a pre-order thing, So like when I get kind of a delivery date, I'll be able to put that in the listing. And then like I said I'm gonna have some sticker stuff. I have a cool fun new surprise product that a lot of people have been asking about, that I'm really excited about. If you follow me on Patreon, you know what it is!! Yeah, that's it. I've had... I have had the most tumultuous October, but I'm hoping that the remainder of my fall and my winter will be nice and lovely. I'm gonna go pour myself another cup of tea from that big pot that I made and just send off this order email, and kind of plan out my week, cuz I have a lot to do this week. So yes. I love you so much! I hope you're well. Thank you to my patrons, you guys are amazing! Thank you for your patience and your support and your just, kindness. It is so greatly appreciated! Thank you for being here, and for watching this video!! And I hope that you learned some fun things in case you are—in case you make stickers or you want to outsource sticker sheets. I mean StickerApp and VinylDisorder, which I use both of them and I love them both dearly, [they] have very small minimums. So if you want to do like, I don't know, sticker sheets for your friends or something, and you don't have a Silhouette machine or you don't feel like investing in one, this is how I have been doing my stickers since I stopped cutting them myself, and I have other people cut them for me. I hope it has been helpful. I love you very much. I hope tt's a good one. Where, wherever, whatever it is, wherever you are, I hope it's grand. It is gonna be so dark here in like, two hours, and I'm not excited about it, but that's what Happy Lights are for, right? It's fine. You're great. I love you. I'm gonna stop now. Stay brilliant, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye y'all! <3
