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How I made a customised vintage sticker machine
Customising a vintage sticker machine with only stickers? Challenge accepted. I’m a New York-based artist, and I wanted the design of this machine to reflect New York since I planned to take it to all of my pop-up shows throughout the city. I wanted it to be something that people could relate to and evoke a little sense of nostalgia.
Hey there,
I’m Lisa Champ, aka @redhalftone. I’m an artist and designer based in New York City.
I spend most of my time illustrating, designing, and working on projects that keep me curious. I hope sharing a bit of my process inspires you to make something too.
Lisa, Community Author
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First things first
To start, I took measurements of each side of the machine and mocked it up to scale in Adobe Illustrator. This way, I’d know exactly what size all of my stickers would be when it came time to set them up for print.
I designed each panel to look like a New York City-themed flash sheet with pigeons, pizza, bagels, rats, and many iconic NY staples. I kept the colour palette very minimal and planned to let the colour of the machine show through some of the illustrations.
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The "right" material for the job
For this project, I chose StickerApp’s transfer stickers because they have no extra background material, and they’d kind of look like they were painted right onto the surface of the machine. This would help add to the classic vibe I was going for.
After the stickers arrived I carefully cleaned and prepared the machine. I removed each panel of the machine to lay it flat to apply the transfer stickers. I also pulled up my to-scale mockup to use as a placement reference so the final result would be one-to-one with what I mocked up earlier. I also laid out all of the stickers on each panel before applying them to get the spacing right.
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First impression
I am very familiar with transfer vinyl, but this was my first time using a transfer sticker. They’re similar, but I learned very quickly that transfer stickers are far more sticky and less forgiving than vinyl.
Throughout the process, I made a few mistakes positioning them. I was able to peel off and reposition some stickers, but others I could not, without ruining the sticker. If you’re familiar with eggshell stickers, transfer stickers have a tendency to flake apart in a similar way when trying to remove them.
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Transfer stickers in action
Transfer stickers are unique in that they have a front and a back liner. The back comes off first, revealing the adhesive side of the sticker. The front liner is what holds all of the parts of the sticker together and aids in positioning the sticker on a surface.
I used a squeegee to flatten the stickers and remove air bubbles as I applied them. After making sure it was fully applied, I pulled off the front liner. The front liner is also extremely sticky and takes a little more muscle to pull off on larger stickers.
NYC at the core
After I applied all of the transfer stickers, it was time to add the finishing touches. I designed a faceplate for the front of the machine. This was one giant metallic sticker to bring the theme around to the front and show people the stickers they could get in the machine.
I also designed seven stickers to collect. The apple core, the rose, bagel rat, NY Rats, the torch, pizza rat, and the angry pigeon. These were all printed on StickerApp’s mirror material. The last thing I did was stock the machine. I designed both common (the silver ones) and rare stickers (the gold ones) to make collecting a little more fun!
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