My Canon PIXMA printer...with the obligatory pile of junk on top.
There are many, many, MANY ways you can make stickers from home. You can upload your art to a professional printer online for durable vinyl stickers, or just print your art on a piece of sticker paper at home and cut them by hand or with a machine such as a Silhouette CAMEO or Cricut. There are so many possibilities to us, what a time to be alive when we can find whatever we need from the internet!
My personal sticker-making preferences include a combination of print choices, depending on the purpose of my stickers. If I want the stickers to be UV-resistant, waterproof, and scratch-resistant, I go with a professional printer. Most of the time I print the stickers myself on vinyl matte or glossy sticker paper that’s intended for indoor use such as using them in journals or hoarding them by hanging on my wall because I have sticker use anxiety.
As an extra form of protection for your home-printed stickers, you can apply a laminate coating sheet, but with the amount of failure and frustration, it made me want to throw stuff at the wall. So I only use those if I really need to…or just outsource the printing.
PRINTER: Canon PIXMA G6020 All-in-One inkjet. I bought this from Amazon back in 2022 after doing some research on Reddit for printers that artists are using. The price was fair and I like how the ink cartridges were the liquid kind instead of the ripoff ink sponges I used before that were absolute garbage. Who am I kidding, all at-home printer inks are a ripoff. However, it’s now 2024 and I’m probably around 50% of ink use left. And this is after almost 2 years of printing full color stickers pages every month. Very happy with those results! It took me an embarrassingly amount of time to figure out why my stickers printed the browns more on the orange side. Turns out I had some driver settings wrong (I should have been using the photo paper setting and set to at best quality…I don’t have the Canon software on my computer, so every computer will run this different).
STICKER CUTTING: Silhouette Cameo 4. I got this around 2020-2021, but I didn’t start regularly using it until I started my sticker club in 2022. I’m still using the same blade it came with, but got a backup one. I’ve gone through several sticky mats, but will go to the desperate measure to reinforce the stickiness with scotch tape in order to go through them slower.
STICKER PAPER: I love Zicoto’s printable vinyl sticker paper. I alternate between matte and glossy depending on the design. If I have stickers with a black die cut line, I like to go with the glossy because black ink prints a lot better on glossy. If I have stickers with a white border, then I go with the matte option. If you want extra protection to keep it fade resistant and scratch-proof, I would recommend some sort of laminate over…but I don’t recommend if you want to keep your sanity.