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I started drawing random things on Krita and got super obsessed with digital art in the span of a day. My addictions just hit me on the head out of nowhere, I'm telling you!
So it started off when I got my own drawing pad months and months ago. After trying it out for a couple of days, I realized I sucked at drawing. And for the months that came after, the drawing pad stayed, collecting dust, in my drawer. I was honestly disheartened and felt like I had wasted money on something I wouldn't be able to use ever again. But for some reason, just recently I felt like giving it another go. I tried the concept of vector tracing where you get a photo and basically trace it. My first project was BTS V. He obviously looks perfect so it was pretty easy to get him done. And man, I loved the results! And that's when I realized that there were different types of digital art and I simply had to figure out which one was for me.
Of course, I haven't yet figured out my style of preference, but the little experiments I did led me to creating my very own pack of digital stickers. So I decided to log my experience in this blog post so that anyone interested could try it out as well. Without further ado, let's get started!
Free Software
I am currently using Krita for all my illustrations, and I used it for my stickers as well. It's a free and open-source raster graphics software, and your girl loves free stuff so yeah.
Here's a link to their website: https://krita.org/en/
Now let's get to the fun part!
Step 1: Picking your concept
When making a set of stickers you have to have a concept that they revolve around. The idea of Tiny Girl stickers came to me thanks to a course in my university that I absolutely hated. The course material was making no sense at all and I was having a hard time trying to make my own notes. I would have fits of rage where I doodled this tiny girl with angry expressions in the margins of my notebook. And at times I would draw a sarcastic smile with captions like, "oh yeah, that makes so much sense". It was pretty intense. But when I went through my notes after a while they seemed pretty funny and entertaining. So I decided to turn them into digital stickers so that fellow students could use them in their note-taking sessions as well.
Step 2: Sketch
Start off by adding a new layer and sketching and outline of the basic shape you want. I totally skipped this step because my sticker had a pretty basic shape and you can't really go wrong with it.
Step 3: Drawing the base
Using your sketch layer as guidance (which, of course, I did not do), you can draw the base of your sticker. This will be the layer that is shared by all your sticker variations. I used the brush _Basic-4 with size 40px to draw this.
Step 4: Adding expressions
Now that you have the base, you can add a new layer for each expression you want to draw over it. For example, one layer for a smiling expression, another for a confused expression, another for an angry expression, and so on. Here are some of the expressions I drew in mine:
Step 5: Saving your files
It's best if you can save your work with a transparent background as a PNG image. This helps preserve the quality of your images and the background won't show when you're using the stickers in different colored pages.
What Can I Use Digital Stickers For?
There are many ways in which digital stickers can be used. Here are just a few of them:
The most basic usage of digital stickers is in digital planners and journals. While many people prefer using tangible planners, more and more people are moving on towards digitized planners since they are more efficient to use. But just because it's digital doesn't mean it has to look boring! So you can now use stickers in them just like you would in a physical journal.
Another use of digital stickers would be to print them out to make your own tangible stickers. You can either get them printed into sticker sheets using a sticker printer, or get a normal printout that you can later make DIY stickers with. Checkout my post Make Your Own Bullet Journal Stickers From Scratch to get an insight to it.
I use my Tiny Girl stickers in Whatsapp! It's so much fun to use them since I made the stickers myself. And seeing others enjoy them as well is just an awesome feeling.
Download Tiny Girl Stickers For FREE
If you would like to use my Tiny girl stickers in your notes and planners you can download them for free through this link: https://www.thecraftycatblog.com/stickers
If you do use them, I would love to hear about it!