These last two weeks I have been creating 3 original designs for stickers. I had several different ideas that didn't make the cut, or didn't even get brought into my Adobe Illustrator. But through lots and lots of brainstorming and trying, trying again, I was able to create these 3 unique sticker designs.  

As you can see, I had plenty of ideas for stickers. Some of these I hope I can still make someday soon! Although I had some great ideas for stickers, I couldn't come up with a running creative theme. I didn't need a creative theme, per say, but I definitely wanted them to be unique. I thought I could do some things related to spider-man, as you can see in the top corner. I wanted to design a camera, some webs, and some spiders. I also thought I could do some vaporwave-looking designs of gaming remotes, or cassette tapes. Maybe some animals on swings would be a fun design! I decided that I needed to start somewhere, even if it ended up bad. I went with the idea of a duck on a swing and got to work. How bad could it be? 

I still think that this idea is cute, and it isn't the worst thing I have ever made. I definitely struggled however to create shapes for this design, and once I got to this point I felt that I needed to abandon this idea completely.

After shaking off the old design, I decided to attempt making a spider. If I could make a cool looking spider, I would go with my spider idea. What direction I would take it in I wasn't sure, but I hopefully would get farther than I did with my duck on it's swing. 

Finally, a design I was really starting to like! I thought I did a great job making the highlights, and the shapes for its body parts. I wanted everything to look shiny and sharp. I submitted this design for some constructive criticism. 

The feedback I received was that the design was looking very nice, but it seemed a bit too sharp and metallic. If I was going for photorealism, I needed to change the design. Thats when I had my themed idea: Spider robots. Robot spy spiders? Spy-ders, if you will. I went back to the drawing board, excited for my new Spyder idea. 

After another few days of designing, as well as looking up all different shapes and sizes of spiders for inspiration, I was done.These three Spyder designs all vary from each other but each have a shared key component: these spiders are mechanical. As you can see with my first spider, I wanted to be able to see inside of it, almost as if its shiny metal casing had broken off on one part. My second spider I wanted to do a close up of its eyes. I decided to make it's eyes camera, which quickly turned into all different sorts of cameras, scanners, and lasers. The last spider I wanted to have exposed gears, but this time with a red and gold color scheme.

I created the circuit board inside a clipping mask of the body of the first spider. I make the radar waves of the second spider skinnier and more curved, thanks to another peers critique that they would look better that way, I even added artistic cuts of lighter red circles to add some shading to my red spider, including a subtle fading white gradient to give the illusion that the gears of the spider were covered with a glass covering.

My Spyder stickers are finally complete! I had a lot of fun designing these stickers. I definitely was stressed about choosing a design in the beginning. I hope I can finish that duck on the swing someday... But overall, I would say that I learned a lot about a creators process during this project. I needed to sketch and attempt several designs before I found something that worked. I also know that I can always return to these designs and make them better. I plan on seeing what I can do to improve all of these stickers. For now, I am very proud of the work I accomplished these last couple of weeks, and I know that the quality is there for anyone who would be interested in buying these stickers from me.