Sometimes I want to give my title or bits of my journaling a little extra “something” to help them stand out from the background. One easy way I’ve found to do that is to make the text into a digital sticker. This technique works for other elements, also, but I’m going to use text as my example here.
I’m going to use Penny’s kit “Unwritten for my example. I love the papers in this kit – especially the brown one with the flowers.
I started out by opening my paper in PS and adding my text. The font I chose was DJB Veronica, because it has nice thick letters that will look good as a sticker. I used the eyedropper tool to pick a blue from the background paper so the text will coordinate well.
The next thing I did was to duplicate the text layer and add a stroke to the bottom layer. To add the stroke – (1) Click on the ‘fx’ to get the layer style palette, (2) with ‘stroke’ selected, move the slider bar to get the width you want (I chose 25 pixels), and (3) click on the color box to choose the color you want for the stroke. I used the eyedropper to pick a brown from the background, then (4) selected a color that was almost white for the stroke. By using the eyedropper tool, I know that I’m going to end up with a color that will coordinate well with the colors in the kit. Once I click ‘ok’, I have my text sticker – it’s that easy!
There are a couple of other things that I did to make it look really good. I wanted to shadow the bottom layer, so I converted it to a smart object by right-clicking on the layer and choosing ‘convert to smart object’. If I skipped this step, the shadow would be on just the text not on the stroked text and it wouldn’t look right. So this is what it looks like with a drop shadow on the bottom layer.
Sometimes this would be good enough. This time, I want to make a few more changes. I’m going to apply a small drop shadow to the top text layer – it really pops now, doesn’t it?
Something else that I do sometimes is to clip papers from the kit to one or both of the layers. I clipped the light blue patterned paper to the top layer and the white to the bottom layer. It really looks good now!
It’s as simple as that! You can make your sticker as plain or fancy as you’d like. To make a sticker out of an element, just apply the stroke directly to the element. Doodles can look great as stickers!
I hope you learned something new today 
. If you use this tutorial to make a sticker for your layout, link up your layouts in the comments – I’d love to see what you do!
