Tutorial - Sticker Letter Background

One of my major frustrations with paper crafting is those annoying leftover sticker letters you inevitably end up with. I have yet to use every single letter in a sheet of alpha stickers. I know one option is to combine your lettering when making a title, which I often do, but I’d like to show you another more fun and creative use for those leftovers. This was a tutorial featured in the August copy of Scrapbook News and Review magazine

Supplies
Alpha and/or numeric sticker letters
Cardstock
Gesso
Mists

Step One: Cut a piece cardstock to the size you need. I’m going to use mine as a background on a card but you could cover an entire 12x12 piece of cardstock for a layout if you choose.

Step Two: Stick your alpha and/or numerical stickers onto the cardstock in a random pattern. You need not only use letters and numbers. You can add any leftover stickers lying around to your design.

Step Three: Paint a layer of acrylic gesso over your entire surface area. If you don’t have gesso, regular acrylic paint will do fine. If you’ve used a dark piece of cardstock, you may need a second layer of gesso.

Step Four: Add some colour to your textured background with some mists. For a more intense colour, you could paint over the gesso with a coloured acrylic paint.

Now that you have your base you could kick it up a notch and add some stamped images or maybe even some embossed images. If you want to define the sticker patterns you can outline them with stickles or maybe even add some textured pastes. Because the stickers are covered in gesso/paint first, leaving you with a neutral base, you can combine leftover stickers from several different sheets to create a single background.