smallcreature

slowly recovering from birdsite

autistic queerthing from france. kitty fighting the puppy allegations. Asks welcome!

Icon: Komugi from Wonderful Precure
Header: Whisper of the Heart



maple
@maple

Hi! My name’s Maple, and if you’ve never heard of me, I am rapidly approaching you at a very fast speed to talk about putting paper up on phone boxes. Wait no why are you running why are yoU RUNNING

For the past few years of my life I’ve been taking up the hobby of sticker slapping and it’s been a very fun way of interacting with the world. Being able to leave a message or a drawing anywhere you want for anyone to potentially see and become inspired, joyous or just plain confused by is an extremely powerful feeling I’ll never tire of, and it’s helped me to connect with a whole new world of artists I may not have otherwise. Of course, I’m always looking to indoctricate and assimilate new victims into the craft and I’ve had quite a few friends ask me how I make stickers and where they should start. Hence this guide, which should cover a lot of the basics! I can’t promise I’ll cover everything - while I’ve been at this for a while I do NOT claim to be an expert on this, I’m mostly just writing this up for fun - but I hope it inspires you to at least give sticker slapping a try!

[warning - this is long]


so what's sticker slapping?

Sticker slapping (or bombing, or tagging - it’s called a lot of things!) is the act of putting stickers up in a public area to convey a message or present a form of art. Naturally, it’s a wide field - a common use case for this practice is to promote activism, such as climate change protests and worker’s rights (see Extinction Rebellion or the Autonomous Design Group), but it can also be used to display artwork by growing artists, or can form part of a graffiti artist’s larger arsenal for name tagging. Really, anything you can put on a normal piece of paper, you can put on a sticker for the world to see.

Stickers have been getting put up since the 60s and 70s, alongside the evolution of standard graffiti practices as an easy way of getting your name up with less mess, in less time, with minimal risk. Then, in the 80s a proper full wave of cultural stickermania rolled in, with kids collecting stickers of their favourite characters from media franchises to put into dedicated books, and using them to decorate their own property like skateboards, school books, speakers, and some other object beginning with the letter S [insert cool S here].

Shown on the left, the Andre the Giant Has a Posse sticker, which shows a black and white image of Andre the Giant, with text on both sides reading ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE - 7'4 520 LB. Image taken by Tim Schnetgoeke. Shown on the right, various bootlegs of this sticker design featuring different characters, including VINNY RAFFA HAS A POSSE, MT. HOLLY HAS A MAYOR, MT. HOLLY MN POP 1, and COMIC SANS HAS A POSSE 74PT BOLD. Image taken by Stickerkitty.

One of the first major examples of street sticker art, however, was Shepard Fairey’s “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” design, created in 1989. Originally being placed around Providence, RI, the sticker quickly spread worldwide after Shepard started sending packs to his friends and placing ads in skating magazines offering them out to anyone for the cheap price of 5 cents per sticker. While he was later forced to stop using Andre the Giant’s name and likeness, he incorporated a similar facial expression into his later branding of OBEY.

Since then, sticker art as continued to gain traction as an independent form of art, covering almost every major city in the world, and as a promotional tool, with many streetwear or skateboarding brands using the medium to break advertising norms. It is a unique, accessible art form that anyone can take part in.


how do i start, then?

a line of four rabbit stickers drawn in blue, teal, yellow and red.

As I stated above, anything you can put on paper, you can put on a sticker, so the only limit to what you can make is your own imagination - it can be a drawing of your oc, pride flags, a funny phrase you thought of in fancy calligraphy, a fake advertisement for some fictional product you made up, hell even all four of those at once! And much more! Of course, while ideas help, it’s not necessarily required - if you just wanna give yourself a cool name and put it on stickers everywhere around your town, you can totally do that, and thousands of sticker artists do that every day as a way to get themselves known in their city.

A good way of getting ideas is to see what other sticker artists are doing! Take a look around and explore your town and see who’s putting stuff up, I can guarantee you there’s at least a few stickers around. Online, I can recommend a couple of places:

  • Youtuber SIVE does a running Sticker Submissions series where people send in their stickers to showcase and trade around with others who have submitted. It features artists of all ages and skillsets and is a great watch if you want to see who’s been making what in the stickering world.
  • Stick’em Magazine was an online blog that does monthly interviews with sticker artists from across Europe. Not only do they make for great showcases, you can also see what inspired these artists to start making them, and they offer their own advice to beginners starting out in the craft. While the website has since been taken down, a majority of interviews can still be found on the Internet Archive.

Some good things to consider when starting out include why you want to do this, and what you want to communicate with your stickers - that can be anything from just wanting to share your art with the world, spread a message, put a smile on stranger’s faces, or just because you like putting things onto walls. Any reason is a good reason as long as it’s true to yourself, really.


what should i use?

One of the big reasons stickering has persisted as a graffiti option is it’s accessibility, and you can go as basic or as extreme as you want to. Below I’ll be showing some of the materials commonly used in sticker making.

address / mail labels

On the left side, a series of stickers drawn on old United States Postal Service Priority Mail stickers. On the right side, blank Royal Mail International Standard / Economy blank stickers.

I’m listing this option first, because depending on where you live, it’s the cheapest - as in, it’s free. Yep, literally free. You can just roll up to your local mail office, ask for some address labels, and then use them to your heart’s content. In the United States the USPS Priority Mail stickers, also known as Label 228’s, have become synonymous with sticker art and graffiti, and you can go to their website right now and order up to 750 of them at a time. In Germany, DHL parcel shipping labels can be picked up from many parcel stores for free and are used extensively around the country. UPS offers free rolls of thermal labels in many countries (though you will have to sign up for an account to obtain them). In other countries your results may vary - here in the UK I’ve been able to obtain free international shipping labels from post offices, though outside of that there is not a common shipment label used for postage.

office labels

A variety of office stickers - a box of 5 STAR A5 sized stickers, some Hello My Name Is nametags, and packs of smaller labels, some blank, some with border designs.

Office labels are simple, versatile and cheap, and you can buy them from any office or stationary store, usually in various sizes and in bulk. You can either cut them up and hand draw on them or use a printer to print designs made in your favourite photo editor. They’re very similar to address labels in that they’re basically both just paper. They’re what I commonly use for stickering, and they’re what I recommend you start with if you’re a beginner in sticker slapping.

The main drawback to using Address / Office Labels is less durability - they can take a small amount of beating from bad rain but they can easily fade away, or the sticker adhesive can become weakened and peel off the surface. You can make up some of this drawback somewhat by using paint pens, or by applying either a laminate coating or a waterproofing medium.

vinyl stickers

A variety of vinyl stickers with various colorful brand logos, characters and messages.

If you’re looking for a bit more professionalism and gloss in your stickers this is the one to go for. Vinyl stickers have higher quality printing and can stand up quite well against elements like rain, dust and sunlight. Usually to make these you’ll need to get them professionally printed by a third party, which can get costly depending on the size and amount you want. The service I use and recommend is Stickerapp - all their stickers have been very high quality, and they offer lots of fancy options like holographic, prismatic and glow in the dark stickers. I also recommend checking locally for printing services, as you may be able to get cheaper prices and help support a local business!

[Edit - @kaezone has made a very good suggestion of, if you go to a college or university, checking to see if they have a makerspace or library where you can make your own vinyl stickers. You can also try your local public libraries, but your results there will vary.]

destructible vinyl

Some blank destructible vinyl stickers, including a large black design, smaller holographic designs, and a sticker designed to look like a UK train ticket, contained in an egg carton styled case.

Alright, now we’re getting into the industrial stuff. Destructible vinyl, commonly known in the sticker art world as an “eggshell” sticker, is highly permanent once placed down. If you try to remove it, it will instead start to flake off in very small chunks. To fully take one of these suckers off you’ve got to have dedication as you’re gonna be there for like an hour. This is one of the most expensive options, but if you’re serious about making your art stick around it’s worth the price. And, much like vinyl stickers, you can get eggshell stickers custom printed or made with holographic or prismatic materials.

permanent markers

a row of colorful sharpies and permanent markers of various sizes.

Alright, now we’re getting into pens territory. Permanent markers are the best cheap option for stickering compared to most other pens - pens like ballpoints are not waterproof and fade away very easily. While permanent markers do fade eventually, it takes a few months of weather battering, so your art will last for longer. If you’re just starting out, unsure if stickering will be a long term activity for you, or you just don’t have a lot of money, I reccommend going for a pack of Sharpies over anything else.

paint markers

a row of colorful paint pens of various sizes and brands.

For more serious sticker making, these are the weapon of choice. Paint pens are super permanent, can draw on almost any surface, and are virtually water and fade proof, meaning that they’ll last for as long as the sticker remains up. Some brands of paint pens, such as the Molotow ONE4ALL and Montana Acrylic runs, even allow for their pens to be refilled with more paint to save on waste, and you can even mix different paint colors together to create new ones. The most common brand of paint pen, however, is the Uni Posca - these are sold in most office and art stores and are very easy to pick up. They are much more expensive than other pens, however (over here in the UK a pack of 8 can cost as much as 20 pounds!).

For coloring, paint pens work a bit differently from other pens due to their opaque nature - instead of doing your lining first, you’ll want to do your coloring first, and then line over the top of it. This can take some time to learn!

try to avoid...

Try to avoid pens like ballpoints, chalk pens, felt tips, and alcohol markers like Copics - while they may have some amount of water resistance, they are not designed for putting up with weathers like heavy rain and will fade easily.


where do i put my stickers now?

Once you’ve made some stickers you’d like to use, it’s time to get them out into the world! The fun thing about sticker slapping is that it helps to encourage exploration - getting lost in your hometown finding good spots to put stickers up is a great way to discover new areas and properties you wouldn’t have known about otherwise, and likewise for exploring new cities you haven’t been in before. But where to go first?

recommended locations

on the left, a light pole covered in various stickers. in the middle, a sticker stuck on a phone box that says nosy humans, always getting into situations they shouldn't be in... on the end, some stickers stuck on the back of a road sign, including an invader alien, a triangle with an eye and bird's beak which says je suit partout underneath, and my own sticker that says it's totally possible to consume souls if you're not human.

Some good locations to start putting stickers include:

  • Lampposts - one of the most common locations for sticker placement due to extremely easy visibility to bypassers, although this may mean your sticker gets taken down quicker.
  • Road signage - another very common location. Sometimes harder to reach due to it being higher. Generally the backs of signs are priorotized first due to the large amount of space on them, though stickers being placed on the front of signs can be done. Just try not to interrupt the actual message on the sign!
  • Telephone boxes - this is one of my favourite locations to sticker bomb for a few reasons. Telephone boxes are seldom used nowadays in the era of the smartphone and they are fast becoming prime locations for both artworks and community libraries. Those still in operation are rarely checked and cleaned so stickers placed here can last for a very long time, especially on the inside. I also enjoy the somewhat secretive aspect of it - some telephone boxes have windows covered with ads meaning you can’t see on the inside, making the sticker a nice little hidden surprise for those who venture in. :3
  • Power / Utility boxes - large empty areas perfect for art, and often used for such - a great place for larger stickers and paste ups, or big collages of smaller stickers. Your mileage may very - some boxes have a bumpy coating that makes it harder to stick anything on them, for example, and some of these stickers will get taken down pretty fast by servicing companies.

lower or higher?

on the left, a bus stop sign covered high in stickers all the way to it's top. on the right, a sticker on a ground electrical box that says you look like you could star in a Disney Channel Original Movie!

One key thing to consider when placing stickers is the height level of them. Placing them at around eye level makes them much easier to see, but makes them more likely to get taken down by cleaners. Higher areas like road signs makes them harder for the standard bypasser to see, but makes it harder for the cleaner to reach and will likely not be taken down for a while. Consider what works for you - if you’re an activist trying to broadcast a message it would probably be more preferable to place your stickers where those can see them at eye level, whereas if you’re trying to make your name last on the streets, go higher. (Some sticker slappers use toppers with extendable poles to reach the top of signs - you can make these yourself for cheap if you have a big pole, an edger and some paperclips!)

hiding in plain sight

on the top left, a sticker on a London Tube train that says Danger! Rudeness attracts Tube Mice. on the bottom left, a fake fixed penalty notice sticker that says You Will Become A Rabbit. on the right, a poster showing a CCTV camera that says LOST - Have you seen this CCTV Camera? Why didn't I have another one to keep an eye on this one? If you find it please email lost at artofasbestos.com.

Some sticker slappers prefer to be more subversive with their stickering, using official looking designs that wouldn’t look out of place at a first glance, but upon further inspection reveals it’s true nature. Some examples include activist stickering designed to parody a business or brand, or stickers designed to blend into pre-existing signage like a park map or written notice.

One good example I like to turn towards is those little stickers advertising businesses you can find in-between convenience stores - it can be pretty fun to design fake ad-like stickers to place here and give anyone looking at them a little surprise…

places to avoid

While there are plenty of public and empty places for you to place stickers, there are some places you should by rule of thumb avoid - for example anything that’s clearly private property such as people's cars and houses, inside locations like stores and galleries, covering up important community signage (you can place stickers around text and imagery, but please don’t cover it up!), religious buildings like churches and mosques, and memorials for the deceased.

As a general rule of thumb you should also avoid stickering over another artist’s stickers, as it’s considered very disrespectful, and in a worse case scenario may cause others to stick over your own work. You may consider exceptions to this - for example, as a rule of thumb I tend to sticker over any fascist / racist / LGBTphobic imagery I find, and you may wish to do the same.


i want more stickers now!

a building covered in posters, stickers and pasteups. in the middle is a mural which says Street art is merely paint and paper. Plus gallons of passion and reams of gumption, by WRDSMTH.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just wanting to put your own stickers up, but many sticker artists find themselves wanting to put up more works from their friends, or get their own stickers up in cities or countries they may not be able to physically reach. That’s where sticker trading comes in! You can communicate with other sticker artists and send each other your works to spread around, helping to get your stickers around the world, and bringing more variety to your own streets. The internet makes this even easier to accomplish today with just a few quick messages to get posting addresses, and many sticker artists online are very open to trades.

Most sticker artists have presences mainly on Instagram - of course, Instagram is Instagram and you may not be comfortable using it so you can always try contacting them through other means like e-mail. Some artists have spread to other platforms like Twitter and Tiktok so you can try those too. Other services like SIVE’s Sticker Submissions exist - you can send in stickers to trade with an empty envelope and in return receive a variety of stickers back from many of the other artists who have sent in.

[As a side note, I am also very open to trades! I’d love to send more rabbit stickers out and see your work, so if that sounds good to you please contact me!]


so wait, is this illegal?

…egh. It’s illegal in the same way that posting lost animal and band gig posters on poles and walls is, in that you’re not really supposed to do it but it’s not really a punishable offense since it’s easily rectified by just, taking the sticker or poster off, and it very rarely causes lasting damage. At the very most it can be classified as a misdemeanor. If you start actually marking surfaces with paint pens or spray cans, that’s a felony and will either land you a fine or jail time depending on the severity, so maybe don’t do that.

Because of this, don’t be surprised or get discouraged if you find your stickers have been taken from where you placed them - it’s just the cleaners doing their job. You can either find better, “safer” spots for them, or just put a new one in it’s place.


how did you get started?

Alright look, this section’s all about me, myself and I, so if you don’t care about that at all you can either skip to the end or just, stop reading and leave the article. It’s fine, I don’t care. Thank you for reading and I look forward to seeing where your stickers end up!

A shot of Camden Town, specifically the area around the Camden Lock bridge, which features some graffiti of two kids hanging and playing under the bridge, attached to strings.

Around the time I started stickering I was in quite the creative slump. Putting constant pressure on myself to keep making art for social media had burnt me out quite badly, and having to deal with a new job at the same time wasn’t helping. While I was visiting a friend we decided to take a day trip into London and visit a few locations, one of which was Camden Market.

The walk to the market from the train station is absolutely LINED with street art - characters, typography, murals, political statements, patriotism, and more. Spending a while just looking around at everything was very inspiring and made me wonder if I could do the same thing in my own hometown, so as we were going home that night I grabbed a packet of blank labels and post-it notes from WHSmith and started experimenting.

A collection of some of my first stickers, mostly featuring a collection of abstract shapes and patterns. One sticker in particular has an arrow pointing down saying PISS HERE. Another has a cat face purring.

Originally I just focused on making patterns and nice shapes, since that’s all I could really think of at the time - turns out doing this is a very great form of relaxation and helped to get my art brain back on track so that I could start drawing more creatures and people, which i also put on stickers. I originally just went under my surname, “Bloom”, for these activities. One sticker in particular I liked making was a bunch of randomly drawn blobs saying random sentences I would think of.

on the left, a ghost with green hair and a red, purple and blue hoodie stares down, with a collection of patterns adjacent. in the middle, another ghost with a pink t-shirt, also with a collection of patterns adjacent. on the right, a character with a striped top makes a peace symbol with text that says sleep sounds good right about now, let's do that.

Fast forward a year later from doing this - I had also gotten into a small amount of writing as an activity, occassionally writing stories from the top of my head as an idea building activity. I didn’t really think they were of a good enough quality for me to release in full, though some particular sentences and paragraphs stood out to me - I decided to incorporate these into some stickers but felt the blobs weren’t a good fit. I decided to make some new simple border designs to house them, and decided on a new name - Fragment, the term for “a piece broken from a larger whole”. That’s the alias I still use for my stickers currently! Though some of the sentences and jokes have gotten sillier too.

on the left, a sticker that says how is it still a problem for me to be a Person with Person Like Qualities, with a small nonbinary flag in the corner. in the middle, a sticker that says DON'T FORGET TO FIND THE SECRET TAPE, above a sticker that says SUPPORT CATGIRL RESEARCH and a Yes Cymru sticker. on the right, a sticker with a melting floppy disk that says Save Point - You can save your progress at this location.

Since then a whole swathe of new sticker and graffiti artists have been showing up in my city. I don’t nessecarily think I’m to blame for that - a good amount of them came due to the 2020 pandemic, with barren streets and chipboard from closed down stores making for the perfect drawing canvas. I’ve made my presence very well known though, building up large collages of stickers around the city for others to add on however they please, and I’d like to think I’ve encouraged at least a few locals to try it themselves. One time I even encountered a street cleaner who had been taking stickers to place on his own wastebin - and he then proceeded to just, drop the bin there and walked away for me to cover it how I pleased. I had fun with that one. :P,

Over the past couple months I’ve focused more on a new kind of sticker - a simple drawn rabbit with its arms over it’s face. While these don’t have much of a meaning, they are very fun and relaxing to draw in the same way the patterns from when I started were, and they’re easy to make and spread around everywhere. I’ll probably get back to doing more sentence fragment stickers soon, but for now I’m enjoying this change.


two images of sticker collages - one of which is on a street cleaner's dustbin, and another on a large electronics box.

That’s pretty much all I have to write about regarding sticker slapping for now. Of course, this isn’t everything, and if you have any particular questions about things you can comment and I might be able to answer them, but I highly encourage you to go out and put some stickers up and discover for yourself! It’s really fun, I promise.

If you'd like some of my stickers, I do sell them through my website!

I'm hoping this will be the start of a blog series where I just talk about anything at length. It was a lot of fun writing this and I absolutely wanna do more of it, so stay tuned I guess...!


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in reply to @maple's post:

Thanks for giving me yet another way of spending my money on dumb things.

On another note, do you know any (cheap-ish?) paint that could be airbrushed on top of thoses shipping labels stickers that could hold a good resistence to wear?

Clear coat spray-on enamel is what I'd recommend! It's easy to find in hardware stores, mechanic shops, or online as it's usually used for car body repairs and comes in matte or glossy finishes. It does an excellent job at protecting slaps from sun UVs which are one of the bigger causes for wear and fading over time. Ideally apply it to your work in a well-ventilated area while wearing a respirator, leave it for 24 hours, and you're good to go! 😘

thank you for this!! I'm super interested in stickers, got some myself but I've always been too big of a coward to actually start sticking them somewhere hahahah. this post was a super interesting read!! my hometown is unfortunately a bit dry when it comes to stickers because they get taken off very quickly but I'll try to get some more silly dogs out there in the world asap >:)

thank you so much for this!

i recently bought a big pile of laser printer friendly sticker paper to label boxes and cables here and then a light went on. and now for some reason little SICKOS guys are starting to show up in my neighborhood.

What do you recommend as far as laminating/sealing such paper? I've been reading about hacking lamination envelopes by cutting them into individual layers and ironing them on the front, but then somebody who's got print shop experience said "you want packing tape." any thoughts?

transparent packing tape can work as a cheap option - personally, i use sticky back plastic to cover my stickers, the same kind of plastic you'd use to cover exercise books in school. easy to just cut a sheet off and seal a ton of stickers all in one go

very good post !!!

another option for getting vinyl stickers made - if you go to a university or college, they might have a makerspace or similar! mine has a large format Roland printer so i make a lot of stickers for my laptop :)

this is excellent!! a method I've used that I want to toss in is screen printing or relief printing on bulk vinyl. you can easily find sheets of adhesive vinyl (meant for cricuts etc) at craft stores, and it takes acrylic or enamel inks really well. if you have a large silkscreen, burning a grid of one design makes it really simple to print & cut batches at a time. that's how I made like a hundred of this very stupid bumper sticker I can't get rid of: https://i.imgur.com/dRENT58.jpg

it's hilarious to see that from afar sticker covered walls look exactly like they used to 10 years ago but now if you zoom in they're saying trans rights and mentioning catgirls

this is so cool!! i've been meaning to start stickering around my city and i've already made a few stickers, but i'm honestly kinda scared to put them up anywhere? the ones i've made so far took multiple hours to create and i'm scared that if i put them up anywhere, they'll get taken down, so i've just been holding onto them. any advice for that?

one thing you can maybe first is making some simple stickers and placing those around your city, and seeing what gets removed and what doesn't, to see what areas would be safer to place those stickers in. however there is always a risk that your stickers are going to get taken down or pasted over, and the best advice i can give in regards to that fear is to accept and embrace it. stickering and graffiti is by nature and ephemeral artform where beautiful works get painted over all the time, and personally i just use that as motivation to keep making more stickers and getting myself out there. i also like to think of it as a limited time event - check out this cool art before it's gone forever type of thing

this is so cool. i've been seeing more and more stickers around my country and i thought people were switching to it because it's quicker than spray paint but it's even cooler that it's its own art form. fr inspiring me to start doing stickers.