DIY: Watercolor Planner Stickers
I don’t know about you, but I traded resolutions in and replaced it with setting intentions and goals for the coming year. To help with that, this year I purchased the Create your Shining Year 2016 workbook. I’m not going to try to sell you on the workbook, although if it works wonders I will share that with you later this year. The reason I’m mentioning it is because it’s beautiful. The pages are filled with wonderful watercolor imagery that makes it kind of fun to fill out.
As I began using my workbook, it came to my attention there was also a coordinating planner with the same wonderful watercolors and some monthly and daily prompts to help stay on track with intentions and goals. As much as I wanted to buy it, I already have my Create365 Happy Planner that I really love. Instead, I decided to create my own simple stickers with the prompts to add to my Happy Planner.
Here’s what I did and what I used to do it:
- Avery 8 ½ x 11 shipping labels (works like sticker paper!)
- My Epson XP410 printer with water resistant ink
- Tim Holtz Alcohol inks and blender solution
- Dylusions ink sprays in London Blue, Vibrant Turquoise and Fresh Lime
- Faber-Castell Glaze
- paint brushes
I started by creating a table in Microsoft Word, setting the cell sizes to fit the boxes in my planner where I wanted to use the stickers and then typed in the prompts. Once I had them all created in the table, I made sure there was padding between the cells and printed them onto sheets of letter sized shipping labels.
My printer has a water resistant ink, but if yours doesn’t simply use something to seal it like Tim Holtz’ s Micro Glaze or a good spray sealer so that the ink stays put when you add the color.
I happened to have some small amounts of dried alcohol ink in a plastic palette that I decided to use up. (Did you know you can do that, you simply reactivate it with blender solution when ready to use!) Taking a paintbrush, I dipped it in blender solution and then the ink, making sure I used plenty of solution. It applied like watercolor, though it appeared a bit dark upon first application once it was dry it had almost exactly the same watercolor look as the pictures in my workbook.
I didn’t have much for blue and greens in palette, but instead of grabbing my alcohol inks, I decided it was the perfect time to try out a technique with Dylusions ink sprays I’d read about. In three of the empty palette wells I places a small amount of Faber Castell Glaze medium, then, with the spray nozzle very close to the well, I spritzed a color of Dylusions. I mixed them well and then brushed them on some of my ‘stickers’. The effect was a little more vibrant than the alcohol inks, but I went with it. I’ll probably use alcohol inks when I make more in the future because the effect matched the workbook colors more closely.
Once the inks were completely dry, I then simply cut my stickers apart with my trusty paper trimmer and voila! They were ready to put in my planner.
I love that I was able to integrate the prompts from my workbook into my planner without needing to purchase anything. And even though I’ve created planner stickers with my Cricut Explore before, I rather liked how fast and simple these ones were to create. Now I wonder…what else could I create for my planner this way…