Design and Create your own Holographic Stickers!

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Diana. I am a freelance illustrator in Austin, Texas. I specialize in children's book Illustration, but I also really love all things crafty. Today, I'm going to show you how you can make your own holographic stickers right at home. Let's dive in. 2. Supplies: Here are the supplies you need for the class today. Look at your supply list that I've included in the PDF document for the links to these products that I recommend when making my stickers. We'll need some holographic printable vinyl. This is the koala brand, and it's this really pretty sorry vinyl that you can print directly on. I also have royal elements, holographic printable vinyl, and this is more of a full sheet of just solid hologram. It also work really well depending what effect you are going for. I like this royal elements brand for making stickers and I've had good experience with them. Anytime I can go with them, I do. I also have this white vinyl by royal elements, and this one would be one that you would add lamination over top of. If you don't have this holographic vinyl, it's okay. We can make stickers using white sticker paper or sticker vinyl, either mat or glossy. I have these two prions. This one is slightly thinner than the royal elements. This one's nice and thick and I feel like it's very durable. This one is durable too, but it's a little bit thinner. When you're shopping for your vinyl, you might want to take a look and see how thick it is. This one says it's 100 microns thick. I'm not sure how thick this one is, but just look at the specs when you're buying your vinyl and see if there's one that's a little bit more durable than the other. It doesn't really matter in the end too much because we're going to add this lamination overtop. So this is self stick lamination and it's really easy to work with. You can get a pack like this with lots of different designs in here on Amazon for pretty cheap, and then you just stick it over top of your plain vinyl and it makes your stickers look glittery or holographic. This particular bundle came with a few different designs, we have just this glittery type of design. It also came with this shattered glass type of effect. There's a sheet that's stars. It's hard to see on the camera, but it's starry, like this koala brand printable vinyl, but maybe not as drastic. This is pretty subtle, it would look more like an overlay over top of your design. But it's really pretty, especially in the sunlight. And then we have this one that's an oil slick, I think is what they usually call it, and it just adds a subtle holographic shem to your stickers. So depending what materials you have on hand or what effect you're going for, you can use a variety of different materials to make these, and I'll show you how to do each one. If you're using plain white vinyl or sticker paper, and you need to add lamination to make it sparkly or holographic, you could also use heat transfer lamination where you need an actual laminating machine to put it through for it to adhere. But for today, we're going to use the self stick option because it's a little bit more convenient. If you would like to learn how to use the heat transfer lamination, I have videos on my YouTube channel where I explain that pretty thoroughly. So you could head over there to watch that if you'd like to learn another technique. You also need a printer. I use the Cannon Pixma IC 68 20 and the cricket Explorer Air two for my cutting machine. You'll also need a pair of sharp craft scissors and I have this tool called a Gyro cut, which is a craft knife with a swiveling head, which I'll be using in today's class. 3. File Set Up: In the PDF document you downloaded for the class on page one, our sticker supplies and on page two is a free sticker file. You can use this file right here with the five stickers to upload directly into cricket design space, and if you are wning a really fast shortcut, I also have a cricket project right here that you could click and you can just click Make it and it's already pre loaded onto the canvas and everything. But if you wanted to print and cut by hand, you can fit more stickers on a page than just these five. I'll show you how to set something like that up right now. I'm going to use Procreate to set up my document. My canvas is going to be US letter size, which is 8.5 by 11 ", and I'll go ahead and import my images into this document and place them on the canvas. I have each of these in their own individual layer. The sticker file that you downloaded, they're all in one layer, so you could just crop them and separate them, so they're all in their individual layers if you'd like to do more stickers on a page than just those five. And what I am doing is just going through and duplicating them and just arranging them on the canvas so I can squeeze as many as possible in here without going too close to the margins or the edges because I don't want anything to get cut off when printing. So I'm just going to arrange them here, see how many I can fit onto this page so I can really maximize the space and not waste any sticker paper. And of course, you can also use your own images. You can just import them into your canvas. And then if you're using a cutting machine, you'll have to draw a border around it so that the cricket or the cutting machine knows where to cut. So I just use a mon line brush and draw a pretty thick white border all around, trying to keep it uniform and leave a nice margin so that if the cut line is slightly off, it's not going to cut into the colored portion of my sticker. So here is my cricket file, and here is my cut by hand file. So now let's briefly talk about how to set up files in cricket design space. I'm just going to press the green plus sign and make a new canvas and then the upload button and choose from my Photolibrary, and input the file that I shared for this class. So this will pop open box where you can do different things like remove the background and things like that. If you have cricket access, you don't need to do any of that. You can just click Continue and then go over here and make sure you set it up as a print then cut image and you can name it so you can easily find it later. And then press upload. It's worth noting that on the desktop app, you'll have more options, and you should choose Complex as the image type to make sure all of the colors come through properly when you print it, and then you can name it and choose print and cut just like you would do on the iPad app. If your image is too large, cricket will alert you, so it will tell you that it can print this large when you click the make it button, you'll see the red exclamation point. You can click it over there and it'll tell you what size it can print. Now there's this feature that says auto resize, so you can just click that and it will make it the appropriate size that it can print and cut. If you're uploading your own individual elements and you arrange them on the page and click Make it, they will try to split out into the most logical format for it to print and that sometimes puts it on separate mats and separate pages. You'll want to make sure that these are attached before you click Make it by selecting them and then pushing attach with this paperclip icon down here. Then when you click Make it, it will keep it grouped up nicely all on one page. 4. Cut by Hand: One advantage of printing and cutting by hand is that you can see you could fit way more stickers on a sheet of sticker vinyl than when you use a cutting machine. So your money goes a little farther as far as the price per sheet of vinyl if you're selling these and also just not to be wasteful. So it's a little bit of pain or a little bit harder. It's cutting by hand, but it's not that bad, and you can get so many stickers on this sheet that I think it's worthwhile option to consider. Even if you're selling them, if you're able to cut them out and make it look professional. I'll show you some tips on how to get the best cut with scissors. Also a little tool I discovered that it's like a handheld cricket machine. Now let's cut our stickers by hand. I have a nice sharp pair of craft scissors that I'll use for cutting. I also recently discovered this handy tool called a gyro cut, and this head swivels as you're cutting. It's a little bit easier to cut curves and smooth curves and lines than with an exacto knife or a craft knife. Oh, I thought this was kind of handy. There is a bit of a learning curve with this one. So I would advise practicing on some junkie material, not your nice sticker vinyl when you first use this one. But if you wanted to try it, I have a link in the PDF doc with all the supplies and tools I used for this class, and it's called a gyro Cut. Since most of you will be using scissors, let's start with that and cut out some of these sticker shapes. I'll go ahead and start with these little mugs up here. First, I just want to cut out the shapes messy, just to get them separated from each other and then we'll go and cut it a little more precise so that it has nice curved edges and looks like a die cut sticker. What you want to do when you're cutting with scissors is make sure that you're going to cut curves versus really sharp corners. If you keep it curved, it keeps your sticker from lifting a little bit better when it's placed on the water bottle or laptop or wherever you're placing it. It's nice to have curved edges and it also helps keep it from splitting when the person peels it off of the paper. You just want to try to cut curved edges the best you can. It's a little trickier with scissors, but if your design isn't really intricate, then it's not too bad. You can always simplify the border too. So I'm trying to do just, like, long strokes and just gently curving the material around as I'm cutting so that I get nice smooth curves. You don't want to do, short, choppy strokes because you'll get kind of, like, jaggedy edges. If you just take your time and keep an eye on the edge of your design, trying to leave the same width of the margin or the sticker paper here around the whole way, then it makes it look really nice and more like a die cut sticker that was printed professionally and not cut by hand. I'll go through and do a few like this and just cut out these little mugs using the same technique. It's helpful when you're setting up your sheet if you don't place them so close together. It's a tiny bit close, but because this is straight, I'm able to just cut straight up in between the two here. But it does leave a really little margin here around the handle. Just keep it in mind when you're making your document for your stickers, you want to leave a little bit more space. I'm just going to look over here and just try to keep this little margin consistent the whole way around the design so that it looks nice and uniform when it's cut out. So you can see how it's fairly simple to just cut with scissors if you wanted to maximize the amount of stickers you can fit on a sheet or if you don't have a cutting machine, so it's not bad to do with scissors. Now let's try the gyrocut tool and see how this works for cutting our stickers. I would definitely practice on some scrap material. You could even use these little bits left from the edges of the stickers you're cutting out. I'll practice on something else first before you go straight to your sticker sheet and just to show you how it works, I'm going to use this scrap paper that's from the back of my elimination. And so this head on this tool swivels and that makes it easy to go around curves with a little practice. It's a little tricky sometimes, so you just need to practice using it first and see if it's something you like where if you want to stick with scissors. You need to press with the tip, and then as you're cutting, you just use a pencil and you just swivel. And it'll automatically cut the curves for you. If it starts to get hung up, I just pause for a second and get myself situated again, make sure it's facing the right direction to continue on. It is easier to drag it towards you than away from you. You could swivel your design so that you're pulling the tool towards you. I found that makes it a little bit easier, watch your fingers. Okay, so this is just, like, a completely random, bubbly shape, but you can see how it makes it kind of easy to do the curves. And you might also have to practice with how hard to push to get it to cut the whole way through because you can see this part cut through and this part, I can't get it to pop out. So it's not cut deep enough to punch out. So I would just practice with it, practice on your material, and you definitely want to use a cutting mat for this or maybe a piece of cardboard underneath or something. I just like this self healing mat because it's convenient and it has these grid lines on it and stuff. Okay, so let's just practice it on our material, and then you can kind of see how much pressure you'll need. In order for it to cut the whole way through. So that was quite a bit of pressure, but it went the way through. So let's just try it out on our stickers now. I left these attached because I want to be able to go around this handle, and I thought it would be easier if I had a bigger area to work with. And I'd like to start in a straight area. So maybe I'll start over on this side. 5. Cricut: So we're ready to go ahead and print this out to be cut on the cricket. Be sure to turn off this bleed because we already added the bleed with the white border, so you can go ahead and turn that off, and then just check your other details over here, make sure it's the right material size, and everything else can be left as is. We're just going to print and cut. We're having a material loaded on the map. Material size looks good, and we're not mirroring it because it's just a sticker, it's not an iron on. So when you're ready, you can go ahead and click next. This is better to do from the desktop. If you can, the app is a little bit more limited. On your desktop, you can use your print dialog box instead of the cricket print settings here. And on the app, you have to push here and you can adjust your settings and choose the print quality and the paper size and all of those things. On the computer, you can choose, I think, even more settings than this. So it's a little better if you can do it from the computer. I'm going to push the quality here and just leave it at normal. You can put it up to best if you want to and it will print a little bit darker and it will print better, but it uses a lot more ink for what I'm doing here. I'm okay with leaving it at normal and the media type. You want to set it to photo paper. And everything else should be good. We printing in color, paper sizes letter. Everything else looks good here. Then I'll go ahead and send it over to my printer. I printed out my design on the koala vinyl first. It's the sparkly holographic vinyl and the colors came out really vibrant and they look really pretty and the stars look really nice with this design too. The only problem is that the cricket is not going to read these guidelines because this is really shiny. There's some things you can do to help with that and to help your cricket find those guidelines. So what I usually do is I reprint it on plain printer paper, so I have another copy and I can use the guidelines from that copy. It says printed here. I'm just going to push edit and I need to print it again up here where it says send a printer is where I can adjust my settings. I don't want to waste my color ink because I only need this outside border for this. I'm going to turn off print and color and you can see it went to grayscale. I also don't want to waste ink, so I'm going to go to Media and quality and push draft and media type is just plain paper. And then that conserves my resources and since I have to do this work around, it's a waste of paper and ink, but I try to minimize it as much as possible by at least not wasting so much ink and then using the paper for something else. I'll go ahead and I will print this out in black and white, and here's when I get. It's an exact duplicate of my stickers, but I only need this border. Now I just cut out the corners and I stick them on here so that my cricket can read the guidelines from this paper and it should line up close enough that it will cut these out on the right spot. It's also a good reason to add those white borders that we added and make them pretty thick so that you have some leeway when it's cutting, especially on glossy material because you have to do things like this. I've also tried in the past to put Scotch tape over this area here so that it can read the black guidelines, and it's hit or miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So I have switched over to this method of just reprinting it in gray scale and using this for my guidelines. Okay, so now I just attach it with some washi tape and just line up the lines the best you can now we're ready to cut. You'll have to go through that same rigamarole anytime you use glossy material. You'll also need to do it with your holographic vinyl. That's just solid because you can't read on glossy or if you're using glossy sticker vinyl, you'll need to do the same thing so the cricket can see the guidelines. Go. Just make sure everything is stick down real good. And you can usually use a light grip mat. Mine isn't as sticky anymore, so I'm just using this standard grip mat, just make sure you have it pressed down on there real good. Now let's load it into the machine. I have my dial set on Vinyl plus, before I begin, I always like to check to make sure that this blade is clean. You can clean it off by pressing it into a bottle of foil, which I keep right here in the holder on my cricket, and I just poke the blade into the foil a few times and it cleans it off so that there's no funky stuff or old sticker material left on the blade. Load your blade and then we'll just press the button to load the mat This is finished cutting before unloading the mat here, make sure that it has cut all the way through your stickers, so you want to check a corner. I can see that this has not cut the whole way through, it would be great for kiss cut stickers, but for die cut stickers, it is not cut through the paper on the back. I'm going to go up here and press the cricket button again. Without unloading the mat, just push the cricket button again. I will cut on the exact same cut lines as it did before so that it will go the whole way through the material before you press it, you might also want to dust off some of these bits because there is little stickery bits left behind. So if you just want to wipe it with a soft cloth real quick before you push the repeat button or the cricket button to repeat the process, then that might help the blade, too. We just did our second pass and now I can see that this did cut the whole way through. If you bend the corner down a little bit, you can see if it's lifting and it looks like it went through the paper or enough where you can punch it out. If you want to do another pass, you can do as many as you need until it goes the whole way through. Just keep pressing the cricket button. This looks like it's good enough for me and I can probably just punch these out where they're still attached in a few spots. I'll go ahead and press the unload button. When removing your stickers from your mat, you don't want to peel your paper upwards. You want to flip your mat over and peel your mat away from your material. That way, it won't curl up as much. These are coming off pretty easily. It might not matter so much for little items, but if your mat is super sticky, then you need to be careful that it doesn't curl your material when you take the paper back off. Some of these you might have to help pop them out a little bit. If your blade can't seem to get through it with several passes. It comes out pretty easily, so it's not a huge deal. You can see how cute these stickers came out and the areas that we left white really have a nice opportunity to be super sparkly and to shine the snowmans little face there and some of the areas here on the letters. So there are fun stickers. You can see on this material, there's a lot left behind, so this is pretty wasteful to throw this away. Usually, I would add in other shapes like I'd put in maybe hearts or snowflakes or stars or something just with my cricket shape tool and just add it all to my canvas or just squish more stickers in there as many as possible where I still do the print and cut. Or at least some shapes in here to fill up more space. But I didn't want to give you guys a super messy crooked file to upload, so I just left it with these stickers here. But I think you could find a lot of ways to use this and to utilize every last space or even with a paper puncher. Like if you have craft supplies that are craft punches for snowflakes or different shapes that are fun for glittery material, you could use the rest of this to make something fun out of. So don't throw it away. Find a good way to use it. So I will follow the same exact process as this for the holographic sticker vinyl. That was just like the oil slick sheet. It's going to follow the same method, including printing the white paper borders here to attach to your sticker vinyl. So you can see an example here, I thought that it had cut the whole way through, and it did not. So now I have kiss cut stickers, like a giant sheet of kiss cut stickers. So what you could do in this case is go through with your scissors and carefully cut on the lines. It's pretty easy to cut because it's already been kind of pre cut for you. It usually just pops right out. Or you could cut the border, a little bit bigger around the designs, or if these are just for yourself, then you could just leave it on the sheet like this and just peel them from the sheet as you need them. But if you are planning to sell then you probably need to get them cut out a little better than this, and you can see how it almost came through, but I should have checked a little bit closer and run it through the cricket one more time. I can probably work with this and punch it out or use the scissors to cut out the shapes so that they become die cut stickers. For our last set of cricket stickers, we're going to use this MT final and I'm going to use the same settings that I used previously, and change the media and the quality, you can change it up the best. I actually kept mine at normal. But I did change the media type to photo paper just so that it prints a little bit more crisp and you can play around with your settings to see what settings you like. But those are the ones I use for my stickers, and then I have the lamination material that we will apply after we print on the final gear. One thing to note is make sure you're printing on the correct side of your final. One side should look a little bit whiter than the other side. But if you can't tell, just pull up a corner here and check to see which side is sticky and then make sure that you're printing on that side. Here's our printout, but before we load it onto our mat this time, we want to add our sticker lamination. So you'll need to make sure you measure it so that it doesn't cover these black lines or else you'll have to go through that whole annoying process with printing out the white paper and adding it back on. So you don't want this to cover your guidelines. So you'll need to cut it down to size, and you can either just cut it within the boundaries here, or you could try to cut if you have stickers that are really spread out, you could cut pieces that'll just go over top of the sticker, but make sure that you allow room for that buffer zone so that it cuts out, and the whole thing is glittery. But because these are so close together, I'm just going to put it over the whole thing. I'm just going to go ahead and kind of mark mine so I know where to cut it, and it doesn't end up covering any of those black lines. So I have a sharpie here, and I'll just make a little mark where I need to cut it. It also has grid lines on the back. So I guess maybe that would be a better method to flip it over and mark it on the back and not on the shiny side. So I just want to line it up here and then just make sure it has enough leeway. It doesn't touch those borders. Now I'll just go ahead and stick it over top of my design, making sure that it doesn't cover over any of these corners. And if it's going to come close, I'm just going to cut it with scissors so that it doesn't go anywhere near those guidelines. A And so now we'll run this through the cricket and you might have to do a few passes because it has this extra layer on the top, which makes it a little bit thicker, so it's not going to be able to cut through on the same setting that you would normally cut your vinyl on. I'm going ahead and set my dial for poster booardPlus because I know that it's going to take several passes if I just have it on card stock or vinyl. So I'm just going to put it on the strongest setting I have without going through the custom options, and I might have to do one or two passes on this. So here are the stickers that are laminated, and they came out really cute and they're super glittery. They feel really durable because of the extra layer on top, and they'll be waterproof because of the lamination. The sticker vinyl I use is waterproof anyway. But if you're using sticker paper, then this could be a nice option to make them more adorable and waterproof them. Drawbacks of laminating them yourself is that sometimes you have errors. If you can see here on the edge, the glitter doesn't go all the way to the edge. I missed the cut line by just a little bit, and if I were selling these, I wouldn't want to sell this dough customer where the lamination stops before the edge of the sticker. You'll need to come back in here with scissors and fix it up yourself, or if it's just for personal use, then it might not matter. But if you're selling them, then you need to be careful about making sure the lamination is going to go all the way to the cut line. And that can sometimes be tricky to know where it's actually going to cut because it's just like a border that you drew in with a buffer zone, but it's not extremely precise, especially when it reads the guidelines differently each time. But overall, it looks really nice. I think they came out really cute, and this is a nice option if you just have plain white, sticker, vinyl or sticker paper that you want to dress up. Here are all of our stickers that we cut on our cricket today, and they came out really nice. There's a lot of cute options here if you would like to see a comparison of different materials. This is a good overview. So this was the holographic vinyl that was glittery that we printed on. And then this was just like the oil slick holographic vinyl. This is lamination, and you can see how it looks a little bit more muted as far as the colors. It might not pick up on the camera that well, but it's just slightly more muted because of the extra layer of material on top of the ink here, but it still looks pretty and it still looks super sparkly and feels really durable. And this was our cut by hand sticker. There are lots of methods here that you can utilize to make your own stickers at home. You don't have to use a print shop, you can make them yourself. I hope this was helpful for you. 6. Thank You and Free Gift: I hope this class was helpful and fun for you today. If you want to download some fun free goodies, you can head over to my website and review the class. If you submit your review, it's so helpful for me to hear feedback and to know what I can improve for future classes to make sure that I am helping people and making the class as much fun as it can be. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoy the class.