THREE WAY | STRETCH YOUR STICKER STASH

So glad to have you join me in another edition of our Three Way series - where we show you how to stretch or use your stash creatively. For today's post, I wanted to share some ways to take all those cute stickers in our element packs and change them up to get more bang for your buck! I chose to work with the cute cactus stickers in the latest PRD BYOC element pack:  Homebody. These ideas will translate to any stickers you chose to play with though. So let's get started ...

1. The first idea to change up your stickers is to turn them into B&W doodles and then if you like you can add some color yourself with paints or stamps. Sometimes just changing your colored stickers to a B&W version can make them so much more versatile since you don't have to worry about matching the sticker's colors to your photos. I simply opened a sticker in photoshop CC:


I used the Image > Adjustment > Black & White option from the menu bar. This often creates shades of black, white and grey.


So once the Black and White dialogue box opens simply slide the color sliders over to the right (closer to 0%) until you get all black and all white with little to no grey. (There are many ways to do this in photoshop - feel free to chose your favorite method of black and white conversion. This is just one option!)


For this sticker, I moved the red, yellows and greens all the way to zero to get a perfect black and white sticker.


Then you can take it a step further and clip some paint splatters or watercolors to your new black and white sticker to add a punch of color to custom match your layout and give your sticker a different feel. I used some paint from the HeART element pack and recolored it in a green and a terra-cotta color and played with blending modes to give my cactus doodle a watercolor feel.


2. The next idea is to see what the Filter Gallery in Photoshop can do with our stickers. Since stickers are much more simplified images than our photographs, many of the filters will leave you with some weird results, but I did find a few worth playing with. Using the same cactus sticker (that we turned into a B&W doodle and then added some paint) from the first example, I used both the Cut Out Filter and the Stamp Filter to get a totally different look. Here's my end result:


3. Our third and final idea is to create a paper pieced feel with our sticker. To do this you simply grab like colors and clip a piece of patterned paper to each color in your sticker. I used this cute sticker for this example:


I grabbed (with my Quick Selection tool) all of the bottom of the terra-cotta pot and made a copy of those pixels. I dragged in a paper and clipped it to terra-cotta selection. I did the same for the rim/top part of the terra-cotta pot. Then I grabbed all the green pixels, duplicated them and dragged a green paper in to clip it to. I wanted the green to be a little darker, so I just duplicated the paper and used the multiple blend mode on the top paper. I now have a cute custom made cactus sticker with patterned papers directly from the Homebody kit! This would be fun to grab paper from a different kit and totally change up the colors and patterns too.


So ... here are our 3 new cactus cutie stickers created with the original Homebody stickers ... in just a few clicks!


Aren't they cute? Hope this gives you some ideas for how to play with stickers and stretch that digi stash!