Freebie Stickers

I am still in the digital phase of designing my own patterned paper. Once I move on to more of a collage look, I will share resources like I promised in an earlier post.

For digital drawings, I use Inkscape. It's free and works on both Windows and PC. Once you complete a drawing, you choose "export bitmap" which saves the document as a .png file. Then you can open it up in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (like I have) and fiddle with it a bit. The result is something like this - today's freebie:


When making patterns from objects, I find it easier to think in terms of a "sticker sheet" type format, then expand it into a repeating pattern. There are some good Inkscape tutorials out there. For now, I'll just say that you should "group" your images and drag one of the corners to make them smaller. When they are tiny enough to please you, use the "tiled clone" feature to create a repeating pattern.

Here is a smaller repeating pattern:

And here is an even smaller repeating pattern:

Another variation: stripes!