My First Stickers

11 July 2026

Nine colorful stickers on a white table. Eight depict planets, one an accreting black hole. Three planets have rings and one has a small moon. The colors match LGBTQIA+ pride flags: asexual, non-binary, MLM, trans, rainbow, agender, lesbian, bi, pan.

I recently started to teach myself drawing, and wanted to make some sticker for QueerCon, a local LGBTQIA+ game/geek con on the days before the pride parade. With the theme of my website and my background in astrophysics, planets and other astronomical objects seemed like a great option (and also less daunting than other objects).

A wireless drawing pad with its pen on a desk with a Star Trek LCARS desk mat.

For those thinking about how to get started, I figured I'd write up a quick post about my process. Let's start with the tools: I started with some pencil-and-paper concept drawings (using a compass for the circular outline) and then used a drawing tablet (an XP-Pen Deco MW, not sponsored or affiliated) to trace photos digitally in Krita. For some of the basic shapes, circles and ellipses I used Inkscape, because it has better tools for splitting and merging vector paths.

Vector outline for a drawing of a planet, inspired by Jupiter. There are six stripes. The top strip and the fourth from the top have small roughly circular patches.
The same planet drawing as before, but with the stripes colored in the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. The patches are in colors of a neighboring stripe: orange, and yellow.

The vector outline of the rainbow planet (inspired by Jupiter) started with a circle, two with I added line to separate the stripes by hand and then smoothed them out with the path editing tool. (I kept the background transparent, but added a white background for better visibility here.)

Then I selected each area with the magic wand selector, configured to add 5 pixels on the outside. Those extra pixels were important, so the outline got filled completely. Then I used a simple pen brush to fill each area with the base color on a layer below the vector lines.

The same planet as before, but with am additional crackle texture in lighter and darker shade of the background colors..
Final version of the planet, with a wood fiber texture, applied along the stripes with occasional swirls.

Lastly, I felt like it need some extra texture. I used to different texture brushes in shades darker and lighter than the background. As a first pass, I used the crackles texture for a cloud-like look, and then the wood fiber texture brush with a large brush size for a sense of directionality on the stripes, plus a few swirls here and there.