Making Sticker Sheets Using Photoshop & Cricut

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, My name is Maya and I'm an artist and video creator. In this class, you'll learn how to create sticker sheets with your own artwork using Photoshop and the cricket machine. We will set up the sticker sheets in Photoshop, upload to the cricket design space, and then print and cut the sticker sheets. This class is recommended for the intermediate level as some basic knowledge of photoshop will be needed. Students who are beginners will still be able to easily follow along as I walk you through each step of the process. By the end of the class, you'll be ready to turn your artwork into sticker sheets that you can either sell or use for yourself. If you've got some artwork ready, join the class now to get started on your sticker sheets. 2. Software & Materials: First I will quickly go over the software and materials needed. So for software you will need Photoshop and then the cricket design space. And then for physical materials, you will need the cricket machine, of course, a printer. And I will have the printer that I use on the screen if you were interested. Sticker paper. This one is from online labels and it's the standard white mat in half by 11 sticker sheets. And lastly, you will need a paper cutter or you can just use scissors. And now I will show you how to create the sticker sheet in Photoshop. 3. Making the Sticker Sheet in Photoshop: Once you have the artwork that you want to make into stickers, we are going to go into Photoshop and actually create the sticker sheet in Photoshop, are going to click on create new. 6.75 inches by 9.25 inches is the largest size that the cricket can cut. This will be the size of the sticker sheet so that we can use up as much of the paper as possible. If you actually want your sticker sheets to be smaller than the size, all you'll have to do differently is and turn your Canvas size here. And then also enter in that size when we are in the cricket program uploading the sticker sheets, and I'll leave the resolution at 300. And we can go ahead and create the canvas. Now that we have our canvas, I'm going to unlock the background and we can start bringing in the individual stickers. From here, you are just creating our sticker sheet, making it look the way that you want it to. And it's a lot of trial and error. You can move things around and that's totally fine. So I'm going to bring my stickers in. What I'm going to do is drag them up to this tab and drop it. The reason I'm doing that is because this brings in the full resolution of the artwork. And if I just dragged my artwork straight onto the canvas like this, it doesn't bring in the actual size of my art. If we drag it from here and then to the other canvas like this, you can see that it's a lot bigger than that one. So I'm just going to delete this. Start over so that you can see. I'll just drag it from here to the other tab, bring it into the canvas like that, just drop it in. Then Control T is to resize. Think. See, I actually don't want to start with a sticker. I'm going to delete that really quickly and bringing a different one. So I think I'm gonna start with this one. I'm going to just start on the bottom right corner and work my way up to the top of the sticker sheet to make things easier. What you want to keep in mind when you're bringing in all of your stickers, is to leave a little bit of space between the sticker and the edge of the paper, just so that nothing will get cut off. And also keep in mind that we will be adding a stroke around the stickers, so that will take up a little bit of space as well. Go ahead and bring in my next sticker. Control T to resize. You can make these whatever size you want. Move them around. You can duplicate them. As many as you want, as many as you can fit in here, just depends on how big you want your stickers to be. Nothing right now is permanent. You can always move them around until you have them in those spots that you like them. I'll make this one a little bit bigger. Now I can go on to the next row. I'm going to have just three stickers in each row. Okay, so now that I'm nearing the top of the sticker sheet, another thing you want to keep in mind is if you are selling these stickers and you want to have your business name or the name of the sticker sheet at the top. Then make sure to keep a little bit of space for like a little banner at the top. To display that information. That's what I'm going to do. I will be showing you how to do that as well. If you start to get too many tabs appear at the top, you can go ahead and just close out of them because you don't really need them again. Now here's the last sticker. Once you have them all on your Canvas, you can go ahead and just move them around, tweak them a little bit to how you like them. You can also move the stickers using the arrow keys if you only want to move them like a tiny bit. Once you are happy with how your stickers look and how they're all laid out. We're going to select all of the stickers, each layer hold Shift to select all of the layers. And then we will drag them into the little folder icon at the bottom. Drop them into there so we create a group. Now we can go ahead and double-click on this group. We're going to add a stroke, going to leave it at 13 pixels and the color white hit Okay. You can go ahead and turn off your background, or even changed the background color to a darker color so that you can see what you're working with. So right now it looks a little bit of a mess. And that's because my artwork must have had just little marks that I couldn't see. So that's why it's got the stroke in all weird places. The next step is to actually clean up those areas. If you have any of those marks showing up, all you want to do is go and make sure you're selected onto the group. Then select on the sticker. So just click on it. Whichever artwork has a mark, and then just erase it. And make sure to select on each sticker. When you move over to a new one. You just want to get the lines, the edges of the stroke to be as smooth as possible. Also, I'm using the scroll wheel on my mouse and holding Alt to zoom in and out. So that's a really easy way. Using quick way to zoom in and out. Areas like this where there's cutouts. I'm actually going to fill this in with white just because I don't want the crickets put out the super tiny areas. Just to make it look a little bit nicer. I'll be doing that next after I've done the cleanup. Of course, if you mess up, you can always hit Control Z to undo. Okay, So I've finished cleaning up. Oops, I missed one spot and we're going to do I've finished cleaning up and now I'm going to go in and paint. So I'm going to use the brush tool and make sure I'm on white. I'm just going to fill in the little teeny areas that I don't want cut out like that. This I'm going to leave it like that. I think I'm happy with this. Alright, so once I've cleaned up the stickers, we're going to hide the group. Were just do that and drag it down to this plus button down here to duplicate it. Now this bottom layer, we're going to select that. We're going to right-click and merge group. So that this way the artwork and the stroke are together in one layer. Basically what we're doing now is creating the cut lines. So the top layer, this group up here is the print and the bottom layer is going to be the cut lines. So now we're going to mouse over this image of the stickers. We're going to hold down control and click on this image that these stickers are selected. We're going to edit, fill. And we're going to fill with white. Hit. Okay. You can hit control D to deselect. Now if we hide the top layer, you can see that this is the cut lines. We're going to turn off the stroke on the top layer since we no longer need that. Just hide it. Like that. Just because it's no longer needed. Now we can go ahead and make the header. What I'm going to do is use the rectangle tool and just go above the sticker sheet in the corner and drag. You can make it whatever size you want it to be. I'll put it about here. I'm going to double-click on that layer. Go to Color Overlay. And then I'm going to just pick a color. I think I'll use the yellow. Well, so you can either turn off the background layer or change it back to white. I'll leave it that white for now. Just so that I can see what this is looking like. I think I like that, so I'm gonna hit okay. Now you can go ahead and type out the name of it, your business name, any information you want to put at the top of it. If you're wondering the font I'm using is called Maiden. I'm just going to leave it as this for now. All right. There we have it. There's the sticker sheet. Once you have the header, we can go ahead and turn off the background. In our going to save. We're going to save this as a PNG. We're gonna go to file. You can either save as do Export As, which is what I'm going to do. Whatever you want to save it, that's up to you. Make sure it's a PNG, and we can save it. Make sure to save a PSD as well. Just so that you can always go in and edit it if you need to make any changes. There we go. You've made your sticker sheet. Now the next lesson we will go and upload it into the cricket and set it up to cut. 4. Uploading the Sticker Sheet to Cricut: Okay, so once you are in the cricket design space, we're going to click on New Project and the top right corner, click on Upload, upload image. And we will bring in the PNG of the sticker sheet that we just made. And I'm going to go ahead and click on moderately complex because that seems to work with pretty much anything. Hit Continue, Continue. And then select Print, then cut image. So it's the one on the right. And click Upload. So now we'll click on Upload and insert images. Right? So here is where we have to resize it to make it the size that it actually is. So go ahead and unlock this button right here, where the size and the width will be 6.75 and the height 9.25. But of course, if you made your sticker sheet a different size than you will need to enter in the size that you used. And just click Enter or hit Enter. And then for the position we will put 00. So now it's aligned in the right spot. So we'll go ahead and click, Make it. Hit Continue. Select, Send to printer. Make sure to uncheck the ad plead and select US system dialogue. So select your printer and then your settings that you want to use. I'm selecting plain paper, high-quality. I'm using 8.5 by 11 paper. And those are the settings that I'm going to be using. You can go ahead and print it. And the material setting for paper depends on how new the blade and the cricket is. If you've just put in a new blade, then it might not need to be cut on a higher setting or you might have to go lower. But I'm setting two papers. So just keep in mind that the material setting might be a little bit different depending on your machine and how new your blade is. And that is how you upload your sticker sheet to cricket and send it to cut. 5. Cutting the Sticker Sheet: Now we can cut our sticker sheets out. At this point, we have uploaded the sticker sheet to the cricket design space. We've printed it out and set the material to paper. Now all we have to do is place the sticker sheet onto the mat and make sure you've lined it up on the top left corner. Insert the mat into the cricket machine and start cutting it. Once it's done, you can remove it. To peel the sticker sheets off. I always turn the mat upside down and then just start to peel the mat away from the paper on a flat surface so that the sticker sheet doesn't curl up. And now you can just cut out the sticker sheet. Then I just leave it like this. But you can also go ahead and round the corners if you'd like them to look that way. But that is basically it. That is how you can make sticker sheets using Photoshop in cricket. Now that you know the basic process of creating sticker sheets, the possibilities are endless. 6. Class Project & Thank You: For the class project, follow along with the class lessons to create a sticker sheet using your own artwork. Uses the class project section to share what you've created. You can either share a photo of the physical sticker sheet or an image of the mock-up you put together in Photoshop. I've created my own class product to give you an example. I'm looking forward to seeing the sticker sheets you create. And if you have any questions at all, please be sure to ask me in the discussions page. If you were interested in similar classes to this one, you can follow my account so you don't miss out on my next ones. And thank you so much for joining this class.