ArtRage Stickers

" So you want to decorate a tree with baubles but you're not sure which baubles to use? No problem! Just open up a sheet of bauble Stickers and drag the ones you want on to your canvas. When they're there, you can scale, rotate and move them around without losing image quality, and delete them if you want to later.

Want a thousand pebbles on a beach? Sure! Pick up the Sticker Spray, select a Pebbles sheet and spray them on to the canvas. The Sticker Spray can adjust their size intelligently as you spray so you don't have to worry about changing tool size for perspective.

Sprayed a hundred crows on to the canvas but one just looks wrong? Easy to fix: Stickers take the 'Undo-Repeat' out of the process of creating that perfect flock. In ArtRage Studio Pro, sprayed stickers are micro-layer objects so you can post-edit any of them so that one annoying crow can be moved, scaled, rotated or deleted without affecting any of the others in your carefully constructed flock.

Both Studio and Studio Pro can use new stickers.

Sticker Sprays presets
Save the files in your Sticker Spray presets folder.
Then from inside ArtRage, select the Sticker Spray tool. Open the Preset Panel and click on the Menu tab (square will squiggly line on it). Locate the option for Open User Tool Presets Folder and click on it to open the folder. This is the folder you should put the presets in.

Some Gold Coin stickers from Someonsane can be downloaded here (as a .rar file - you will need to extract the presets)

Sticker Sheets

You can add and organise them using the folders only (hat tip: ByronCallas)
1/ Select tools/user content/open user content folder
2/ Open Stickers Folder
3/ Drag sticker into folder, or into any nested group folder.
If you want a new group folder, create the folder, and drag the sticker into it. If you want a new sticker name, rename the sticker file.

Or you can organise and add them from within ArtRage. (See Juz's Post
left hand side of your sticker panel.

2. From the same menu button on the sticker panel choose 'Open User Stickers Folder...' (image two)

You should now see your stickers folder with a folder inside that matches the catagory you just named.

3. Drag or copy the .stk files into this catagory folder (image three). In my example the .stk's get placed into the Glossy2 folder

4. Close and reopen the sticker panel. Navigate to the new catagory and your stickers should be there ready to use

Note: on my machine the stickers were there and could be used immediately but the preview image for them did not display correctly until i closed and reopened the AR3 application.

4/ Close and reopen AR3.

To use sticker sheets as a sticker spray
1. Choose the sticker spray tool from the tool panel. From the 'Settings' panel click Sheet and navigate to the sticker sheet you wish to use as a spray eg/ Diamond Multicolour - Juz (image one)
Note: this list chooses from installed stickers, make sure you've installed them as in the instructions above

2. Click the 'Spray Variation' button in the settings panel to open the 'Spray Variations' dialog

3. From the menu in the Spray Variations panel choose "Set Up Settings for Object Spray" (image two)... Note: You can tweak these settings later as desired.

4. Spray your stickers

In sticker mode, new stickers will be resizable and movable, as discrete items.
Stickers automatically default to a 'sticker' mode when applied, unless you are adding them to a layer which is already in art mode - by having paint or pencil, or some other drawing already on it. So you need to add it to a fresh layer to take advantage of the sticker mode.

To shoft it to paintable/art mode, and be able to (for example) smear the stickers, with the palette knife or use any other painting tool - as in the image above- you can:
1. merge the layer
2. Cllick on the little feet (upper right of the sticker layer in the layer menu) and there is a menu item that allow you to convert the sticker(s) to paint.

"Here is an example of creating a sticker to turn it into a brush. In this case I was looking for something that could be transformed into producing cloth thread effects, and thistle effects, and could also provide subtle texture and color variation when painting relatively smooth surfaces. Having already experimented, I felt the sticker drawing here might do the trick.

The drawing above was made with the ink pen. [NB: As a transparent PNG]
Then I imported it to the sticker creator to turn it into a sticker.
Then, using the sticker spray gun tool and its versatile spray gun variation module, I was able to make several "preset" brushes to accomplish the task.

With a little practice you can make brushes to accomplish just about anything. And you can get many happy surprises from your sticker brushes just playing with the infinitely variable spray variation module, the color picker, the brush sizer, and the spray variation rate. For example, it is changing the brush size (in part) that transoms the output of this sticker from providing rough, thistle-like textures to producing variable smooth surfaces with subtle color variations."

The "background" in this painting is accomplished with a brush preset I made that processes the four stickers on the sticker sheet that can be seen in the program screen in the second image below. A variety of outputs are obtained by tweaking spray variations settings, brush size, color selections, spray rates and shadow selections.

I created the sticker to get certain types of textures ranging from smooth to rough with different textural and color patterns. The image below shows just one of those desired patterns.

The example above is just one of a million ways to use the tool. I'm just showing this example as one of many to get the idea across.

ArtRage Studio Pro users can make new stickers (ArtRage Studio users can use new ones, but not create them). The following tutorial was created by Silentman and can also be found in the Ambient Design Forums. You can also download the PDF here

During the tutorial i hope to share with you some key rules for making stickers, and by the end i hope that you will be able to go onto make even more complex and exciting stickers. During the beta phase us testers had an interesting time getting used to creating stickers, whilst making simple stickers is extremely easy, making more complex stickers is well.... complex, when there is more than just the colour map involved, you need to learn how to make all the different maps play nicely together. This tutorial is a culmination of the blood sweat tears of many beta testers trials & errors not least of all SomeoneSane, who has helped us all come to terms with the sticker creator right from the word go, also i have spent many hours and posts discussing different road blocks i came up against along my journey, with both Andy and Matt, without their help and guidance this tutorial would not be possible, my hat goes off to you, the creators of an Awesome Program ArtRage 3 Studio Professional.