How to Make Sticker Sheets in Adobe Illustrator | Quicker than Photoshop!

[Music] i'm going to show you how i create my sticker sheets now there's a number of tutorials on how to make sticker sheets for um printing and cutting on the cricut but a lot of them tend to use photoshop i don't use photoshop i use illustrator the reason being that i use illustrator for a lot of my work so it's i'm a little bit quicker with it and i find that there's actually a lot more streamlined processes than what you would have to do in photoshop so i'm going to show you quickly how to do this and then i might do a follow-up one of actually showing you then doing it in cricut and making the actual stickers so the first thing that i did was i created an artboard that was of the right dimensions so working in inches um just because that's what most of you will probably see when you're in cricut even though i have mine on metric because metric makes more sense but the maximum size that you can make for a print then cut on cricut is 6.75 by 9.25 inches so i've created the artboard to show that now when it actually will go into cricut it'll be on its side but for the purposes of this i'm going to put it in a landscape format so that we can actually see the sticker sheets together you could do them one on their own and if you wanted to do a single sheet and then duplicate that in cricket you just need to halve that so it would be 6.4.625 and 6.75 and then you would leave it in that you want to make sure that you're on cyk color because that is for print if you do it as rgb you can it just means that your color accuracy will be different when it actually prints it across and you want to have it at a high resolution so um 300 is generally the best one that you can go if you do it for these it's going to be really pixelated and kind of lit when you print it so this is what your artboard will look like so essentially i'm making two sheets per page and then on a cricut it'll actually be tipped on its side so it'll be 90 degrees this way if that makes any sense so the first thing that i do is i create the actual template and the template then is my standard template and then i just change certain things like the actual headings will be the same i just change the text i'll change the design elements and i've just put a background on just so that you can see what i'm doing for the purposes of this when you export it you need to have an actual color background whether it's white or a color um i generally won't print with a full color because it just wastes too much ink because they're not part of the actual sticker so the best way to do it is you're going to be making two per art boards so if i go to here you can see what the size is it says 4.262 by 6.75 and then once you do that you will line it up top and to the right so you can instead of having to kind of guesstimate by doing like this and you're like oh is it um i mean it is because it tells me that it is but you can also if you do a single click you can type in your measurements here [Music] and then you adjust this little toggle up here says align to artboard and then you would just align it um for these ones because i'm doing two per thingy i'm gonna align it to the up and left for the left sheet and up and right for the other one if that makes any sense i've done two examples here so that you can see a lot of people like to do rounded ones which is cool and because cricut is going to be cutting out the actual sheets for you um then you can actually set it there's two ways that you can do it you can either have it that you create a rectangle as i've done on this one and you see how there's these little dots down here if you press shift and you click onto the little dots and you can see how my arrow's got like a little curvy line underneath it it's how you change the corner radius so you keep pressed i'm still holding shift and i'm clicking and then i'm going to bring it back and you can change how much so you can have it like a lot or not i think i've got mine set to 0.2 on the other ones and then it just gives you a nice rounded one and then you would do the same so you would only have to do it for the top you shift click click and you want to have it matching so you can see radius is 0.2 inches and that's as easy as that and the other way to do it is if you click and hold you'll see that it has other options for your other shapes and you can do a round rectangle tool which will bring you up this and then you can still change your radius and you can also do the same thing where if you click once you've you set your dimensions here and then you actually set your corner radius in here for example so there are a couple of really quick ways so this is literally just a rectangle this is literally just a rectangle and then i just added my text you can then so i do them all on the one layer you can then actually have that layer set as a template so with that layer highlighted you then click on these little hamburger thingies and then you'll slide down and you'll see template and once i hit template it will turn it into a template and it'll also lock it you can just unlock it if you need to change anything in there then you bring in your artwork so my artwork uh depending on what i've done so some i've got actual vector designs and others are ones that i've done in procreate so these are procreate ones and i've exported as transparent pngs and then i just drop them in then what you want to do is create the outline some people do their outlines in procreate but that requires like hand doing it and it never looked very good when i did that and it took me forever and i look like poo so i'm like why would i do that but here is the hack so so what you need to do is i've created another layer underneath just to make it life a little bit easier and then you can just combine it at the end so you duplicate this so con command c or control c for copy and then ctrl shift v to paste in place so you can see it's it hide the art layer now you want to do image trace now the image trace that i i like to be able to have like a bit more control so i've actually got it over here but to get to it normally you go object image trace make um or might be up here um that's just a matter of setting up your your tool stuff up here so i've got it over here and i go image trace and i do black and white and then over here i can actually control it a bit more so i turn off i click the ignore white and you can see how it's um ignored now because i've done it my the outline is in white so it's ignoring all that so if i go to threshold i can flood it a little bit more so you gotta be careful because if you do it too much it'll just flood the whole thing and if you do it not enough there's nothing there so it's just moving it along until you get um what you want to a reasonable amount it's never necessarily going to have everything but there's a way that you can fix it and i'll show you um so you can go here is view you can trace room result if you go outlines with source image it shows you how close it is to the original it doesn't have to be like pixel perfection because it's not really the point of what we're doing here if you're doing like if you're actually creating vector from hand-drawn artwork or something like that then but you need to do a lot more cleanup but anyway so i usually just fiddle with a threshold i don't generally worry too much about this it just depends on the actual artwork that i'm doing i've got preview turned on that makes a little bit easier now this is the next step that's really important is you hit expand okay and that'll create that now you can see that there's this little moon part in here i've got um two arrows i usually use my hot keys so you've got a which is my direct selection tool which is this one and v is my selection tool if i hit a i can actually click on that and then i can just delete it otherwise you can do um with your selection tool is you click it double click it or bring it into this thingy and then um click it again and i'll bring it up and you can just leave it and then double click back out of it and you're fine whatever's easier okay so we're not quite done yet but i can now turn on my artwork and you can see and it's not like hanging over too much like there's a little bit of hangover but it doesn't really matter for the purpose of this okay so i'm going to turn that back off for the moment so that i can select it now i like to turn this back on so that i can see it the next part that you're going to do is go object path offset path you can choose how much you want it to offset from the original so this is going to tell it how much so i can turn it like one inch which is going to be a fuckload i can turn it to this or i can turn it down whatever is your fancy i can't remember what i said but whatever whatever your preference i have it onto round i find that it is the nicest looking one um but bevel just changes these edges here and miter does the same thing and then you don't need to worry about that because you're gonna have it on round and i'll just make it nicer you hit okay um see how it's got the inner and the outer if you want you just select them both and you want to combine them if you want um you go to your path binder and you're going to hit shape mode needs to be the shape mode not the pathfinder and then this one just says unite and now it makes it one shape so i'm going to show you um a more complex one and then you can just change the color to white if you want to have white whatever works for you so this one i'm going to ctrl c ctrl shift v so it pastes in place you can see there i do the same thing i'm going to go image trace black and white i'm going to open my little doodad tell it to ignore white now because the skull is quite a light color it's obviously going to want to try and ignore all that so this is where you go back to your threshold and you push it up to get to where you're happy hit expand and like i said we're not done yet you need to actually make the outline so select it turn your artwork back on object path offset path okay and then you can change it to whatever color you want okay there are some times when you'll end up with like areas that it won't fill in and you can literally do what i did like with the moon so on this one it'll have like a gap here and then i just delete it like i did with the moon on her that's how i do my artwork now i put all of my artwork onto the one layer if i do this when i'm usually figuring it out i have them on two separate layers you can just select them all so just select it and then command g will group it all together and it'll put on the one layer so i can turn that off when you export it you need to unlock it so turn your artwork layer off you're gonna go file export export as use artboards now i'm clicking use artboards because i've got stuff that's not on the actual artboard and it'll still try to save that within it for some reason so then um you want to click use artboards if you don't have hang an offer like i do then don't have to worry about that then you click export you're going to have transparent um or you can have it as wide if it's like a single sticker sheet but i do transparent because i've got specific shapes and stuff it's on high and then you're going to keep click ok so you want to have your backing card on one file and then you're going to have your artwork as a separate file it's really important that when you do your artwork it is saved as a transparency because you want to see your backing card so you do the same thing uh you can use upwards for mine because i've got stuff all over it and make sure they're transparent um otherwise it's going to put like a background behind it and then it'll obscure your artboard when you bring it in your sticker sheet and that's how i do it so you can see that it's really quick now the reason that i don't flatten my layers um because you'll need to flatten it when you bring in into cricut for these so it doesn't try and cut out like each individual shape but the reason that i don't do it in my illustrator is if i want to come back and change anything or like i've realized that i've made a mistake or something isn't printing properly or whatever then if i flatten it i can't go then and edit red i can flatten it and cricket without any issue so i just do that or you duplicate the file and then flatten the duplicate file and not the original and that way you're all good so hopefully that makes it a little bit quicker and easier for you um as i said i i find this much more streamlined once it's all set up for me i have a process that works very quickly it's a lot easier and cleaner than having to draw it by hand in procreate and i find the steps so much easier than doing it in photoshop because once i've got my um template set up then i just use that for all of my other ones so on my templates i have my shop link i have my logo i have the name of the sticker sheets and so this is still editable it still works i don't have to convert to outlines it still works fine when i export it as a png but you can also change to outlines but it means that i can go back and edit this as i need to for anything else i can yeah fiddle with it as much as i want and then the reason that i've got white and back is originally i had drawn these on a black background so i wanted to see what it would look like or to give people options because i've got mine on the cover of my notebook and my notebook has like a recycled leather cover it looks better having black whereas some people like to put it on pages and pages or whites might look better on white so yeah there you go hopefully that was really helpful let me know if it was and i'll do a follow up to show you how i do it in cricut thanks guys bye

Channel: mudg3t

Views: 417

Rating: 4.7894735 out of 5

Keywords: cricut, cricutprintthencut, cricuttutorial, stickersheettutorial, how to, cricut sticker sheet tute, adobe illustrator, Illustrator tutorial, Illustrator sticker sheet tutorial, kiss-cut stickers, tutorial

Id: PueIiYbaaGo

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021