How to Create Stickers with Midjourney and Adobe Illustrator

Stickers are a fun and creative way to express yourself, and now with Midjourney and Adobe Illustrator, it is so easy to create your own custom designs. In this blog post, I'll show you how to use these tools to create amazing stickers that you can sell online.

The Ultimate Sticker Design Guide: How to Use Adobe Illustrator with MidJourney

Let’s go ahead and cover some basics first for anyone that might not be familiar with some aspects of this topic.

What is MidJourney and How Does it Help with Sticker Design?

MidJourney is a powerful Text to Image - and Image to Image - AI tool that can help you create amazing sticker designs quickly and easily. In Midjourney’s own words they are “a small self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI.”

Essentially you can input your ideas in the form of a prompt made up of text and images and Midjourney will take this prompt and generate four images for you to choose from. If you don’t like the four options you can re-roll or prompt again until you get an image that you like.

How Do You Write a Prompt?

Prompting is an art form in and of itself and with the release of Midjourney version 5 it is constantly evolving. Midjourney prompts prior to version 5, were a little more like composing a string of keywords which followed a particular structure.

Now with Midjourney V5 you can prompt with more natural language writing style while still adhering to a certain level of prompt structure. They have an amazing prompt resource on their website and the community on discord is friendly and open to sharing their knowledge. You can also find prompts on the community page of Midjourney.

Getting Started With Discord and MidJourney

Getting started with Discord is easy and straightforward. First, you need to sign up for a Discord account by visiting their website or downloading their app on your phone or computer. After creating an account, you can join or create servers, which are essentially chat rooms where you can connect with other users who share your interests. To join the Midjourney server go to their website and follow the instructions provided to join the Midjourney server.

Please note in order to sell images you generate with Midjourney you do need at least the basic paid plan.

Design Stickers with Prompts

There are so many ways to craft a prompt to get a sticker design that will suit your taste and needs but there are some general basics that will get you started on your sticker prompting journey and they are including these prompt words: Die cut stickers, White background, Clearly defined from background, no hands

More Sticker Related Prompting Keyword Ideas

Kawaii, Cute, Watercolor, vector graphic, 2d graphic illustration, anime, chibi, cartoon, children's book illustration, etc

Color and Theme Keyword Ideas

B&W, black and white, Monochrome, duotone, cottagecore, vibrant, moody, boho, dark academia, etc

Research Niches and Themes

Now it's time to do your research, find niches and themes that will sell well on the platform of your choosing whether that is Etsy or Redbubble etc. You can research on platform or use other research tools such as SEO tools for products or you could ask Chatgpt what is the best sticker niche. While you are there get ChatGPT to generate you an abundance of prompts on your sticker niche and themes.

Also you should decide how you are going to sell your stickers more specifically the type of sticker as this also affects your type of customer you are selling to.

Types of Stickers

Digital Stickers

Used for digital planners and digital note takers. Can also be classified as clip art and design elements for others to use in their own projects such as small print and cut sticker shops, surface pattern designers, clipart for POD businesses.

Physical Stickers

You physically print or have printed the stickers and keep stock to sell, package and ship to customers yourself.

Print On Demand Stickers

You upload the digital file and have another company print, package and ship the physical product with your design on it to the customers.

Create Your Stickers in Adobe Illustrator

By now you should have an abundance of images to make into stickers with Adobe Illustrator. I would recommend cleaning up the images first in Adobe Photoshop to remove the background and any unwanted elements of the design using either the spot heal or the selection delete and content aware fill tools. Do remember to save the images as PNG files to retain the transparent background you have just created by removing the background.

If you have used the prompt keywords “die-cut sticker” you most likely already have a white border around your sticker and if you have upscaled and cleaned up the image well you might not need to even do anything else. However I find that the “die-cut sticker” border to not really be the best for my stickers and purpose and prefer to remove the Midjourney generated border and create a fresh clean one in Adobe Illustrator.

Create an artboard suitable to your sticker type size needs and go to File > Place and select your images. Place your images on the artboard within Adobe Illustrator, I prefer to place each image on a separate layer to keep things organized [ cmd/ctrl +L ]. Next you are going to want to create copies of your sticker images and paste in place [cmd/ctrl + C and cmd/ctrl + Shift + V ]

Selecting the top copy of the sticker you can either leave it as the original PNG image or create a vector version of the image. If you are creating digital stickers for use in digital planners on the iPad you can probably just leave them as PNG images.

If you are wanting to scale these up for print on demand products then you would go ahead and convert them into vectors using the Image Trace tool. This takes a minute or so to adjust the settings until you get a vector image output that you are happy with but much quicker than creating the vector from scratch.

Next is the bottom copy of the image you placed on the artboard, we are going to use the Image Trace tool again to create the outline of the sticker. For this I like to use the settings, Logo, black and white, Threshold 254 and then adjust the other sliders as needed. After you are happy with the outline of your sticker you are going to expand and then Offset patch the distance you offset is up to you and your sticker requirements.

If this will be a digital sticker for digital planners you can go one step further and add a drop shadow for the extra effect if you like this style of digital sticker. Just select the “fx” from properties and select stylize > drop shadow > adjust as needed.

Related Articles

How to Create Digital Paper using AI: A Midjourney and Adobe Tutorial

Can You Sell Stickers Made from Midjourney?

Yes you have commercial rights to the images you generate using midjourney paid version (No if you have only used the free version) and of course, provided you are not creating stickers that infringe on anyone else’s copyright.

Where Can You Sell Sticker Designs?

You can sell your stickers on a number of platforms, such as your own Shopify website, Etsy, Society6, Redbubble and many more marketplaces for both digital products and print on demand products.