The Stickers Have Arrived!

I bought 10 sheets (from stickermule) because that's the minimum that you can buy, but they sent me 14. No complaints there. The first thing I noticed was how nice the material is. The cut lines aren't perfect, but they are good enough for my purposes. If you ever want custom printed stickers, definitely consider stickermule (although there are many, cheaper alternatives.)

I actually received these about two weeks ago and forgot to make a post. By now, I've sent 6 to friends in other states and handed out 4 or 5 to classmates. I'm holding on to the rest until I bump into more Overwatch nerds.

Mei Sticker Sheet

Every semester, I buy one, five-subject notebook for all of my class notes. Last year, I made a habit of putting a sticker on the front cover. The first sticker came with some anime figure I bought and the second was designed by a friend. This year I decided to make my own design. Mei is one of my favorite and most-played characters in Overwatch, so she was the obvious choice for a sticker design.



I originally planned to make just one sticker, but custom sticker-printing websites require that you buy your stickers in bulk. It turns out that on stickermule, it's cheaper to buy ten, 8.5x11 sticker-sheets than 50 single die-cut stickers. So that's what I decided to do. I chose 8.5x11 inches because I want the largest design to be about 6x6 inches. It's pretty cool that we live in a world where you can send images through the internet and get somebody else to print custom cut stickers for you, but $70 is still a lot to pay for stickers, so I had to come up with more designs to fill the page. My first idea was to make a bunch of different version of the original Mei head.

Unfortunately, seeing so many versions of the same sketch just made me tired of it. As much as I love Mei, I don't want ten pages of Mei heads. So, I made two text stickers, "MEI IS BAE" and "BRO, chill out." The first is a meme (if you haven't heard) in the Overwatch PLAY OF THE GAME style and the second is a reference to Mei's quote "HEY, chill out." I felt like "BRO" was more fitting for my designs.

After looping Mei's emotes for several hours, I didn't feel the need to sketch Snobal (the little robot). Instead, I just free-handed him in Photoshop and looked at references later to make changes.

At this point, I decided to include two Mei heads on the final sheet. The largest one is Mei wearing my beanie and the smaller one is obviously Mei with shades. I made the beanie in illustrator using pattern brushes to create the vectorized thread texture.

The last and fastest sticker I made was the one with Mei and her icewall. Some of you can probably tell that I used a standard Photoshop filter (I KNOW I'M LAZY I'M SORRY). I basically just combined two screenshots, put the cut-out filter on them and then drew the shadow underneath. Sure it's lazy, but I think it looks okay. I can imagine sticking it to something as a decoration. At the end of the day, that's all that matters with a sticker.

The stickers are on their way now. I'll post an update once they get here.