Piko, Ming and Toki | Created for line stickers

Project Created For: LINE Stickers

Design Tools: Adobe Illustrator

Duration: May 2018 - August 2018

About This Project

Left to Right: Piko the Chick, Toki the Bunny, Ming the Kitty

LINE Corporation is a popular instant messaging platform in Japan that focuses on delivering free messages and calls. One aspect that makes LINE stand out from its competitors are their stickers. As of May 2017, LINE has over 720,000 sticker creators registered designing over 400,000 sticker sets and themes. Unlike Facebook or other social media applications that require more professional backgrounds, LINE allows anyone to become a creator. All you have to do is submit your set of stickers under the LINE Creators guidelines and as soon as it is approved, it can start being sold on the application.

I decided to start this project near the end of May in order to test my creativity and to familiarize myself even better with Adobe Illustrator. I made a total of three sticker sets with different characters starting from Toki the Bunny 1, Ming the Kitty to Piko the Chick.

Aesthetic & Inspiration

Toki the Bunny 1 was created as a result of my infatuation with bunnies and chubby cheeks. The images on the left are two references I used as I was drawing my character designs for Toki. As you can see, the main features of both stickers are their relatively plump cheeks and blush. I modeled Toki quite a bit in regards to those aspects. For this sticker set, I focused a bit more on the cuteness of the character rather than the realistic aspect of each feature.

The second sticker set I made called Ming the Kitty was a bit more focused on trying to make the expressions and actions a bit more realistic. I researched different aspects of cats that would change depending on their expressions and emotions and tried to base my designs off of those references. As you can see from the references below, I chose to look at the cat ears, tail and facial structure positioning while creating my designs. My roommate Ying was actually the inspiration for this character design as her spirit animal is a cat.

Roommate Ying Chen - Inspiration for Ming the Kitty

Piko the Chick was created as a result of my dissatisfactions from my previous two sticker sets. For Toki the Rabbit, I was not satisfied with the final result as the lines created felt very rigid and stiff and did not give the bunny any sense of fluffiness. I was also working on understanding how different tools work so I was not able to make the bunny its best version of itself at that period in time. As for Ming the Kitty, although I liked my final sticker set. I got stuck halfway through in coming up with more sticker designs. I originally wanted to make Ming the Kitty a set of 16 but it ended up as a set of 8. Piko the Chick was created as a result of my desire to continue making more cute and fluffy animals. The way I tried to draw my designs was also a bit more simplified in terms of body structure, which helped a lot in creating repetitive poses.

Sketches, Process and Procedure

The sketching process involved a lot of thinking and brainstorming in regards to what colors, styles, and expressions I wanted to convey through each sticker idea.

For Toki the Bunny, my first design iterations were on a scratch piece of paper, which no longer exists, but it was very similar to the one on the top left. I made several different designs of the bunny and simply chose the best ones from the batch. As for Ming the Kitty and Piko the Chick, I took a lot longer in determining what poses I wanted to create. One of my biggest problems was figuring out how to shape their mouths in order to match certain expressions. For Ming the Kitty, I did research by searching up various images of cats with different expressions (happy, sad, angry, shocked, etc).

As for Piko the Chick, I tried to grab inspiration from my everyday life. If you look at the three, quite badly drawn, sketches to the left, they were drawn on a sketching app called “SketchBook” while I was walking with my friends in downtown Pittsburgh. The ideas just suddenly popped up, so I just whipped out my iPhone and started sketching.

I had different challenges with each sticker set when I started to create the stickers through Illustrator. In my original bunny sketches, I wanted Toki to have some empty spaces where I could put in some lines, indicating fur; however, I did not know how to fill an entity if it was not a closed shape. Since the background of the art board was also white, I originally thought that I was generating proper sticker designs on the platform; however, when I moved the first iteration of the stickers onto the grey background on the side, the bunnies were see-through. I ended up needing to start over and make the stickers using closed shapes and adding on some small short lines indicating fur; however, I think this version makes the bunny look less furry and more smooth around its edges. The two versions can be seen below in the left Figure. As for Ming the Kitty, since the kitty is grey, I decided to remove the stroke. The only challenge I faced in this sticker set was during the sketching process, since I was unable to think of more poses to draw out. Lastly, for Piko the chick, my original version had very smooth edges like Ming the Kitty and Toki the Rabbit; however, after receiving some feedback, I decided to add a stroke weight of 1 using a fuzzy brush in order to make fur-like strokes.

Left: New Version. Right: Original Version

Final Versions

All three stickers were approved by LINE and are now on sale. Not much promotion were done for the stickers as my main goal was to challenge myself with learning how to effectively use Illustrator to create these stickers. I decided to choose the lowest tier sticker price which was $1.19 or 50 coins on the LINE app. I would prefer to make the stickers free in order to gain more publicity and downloads; however, LINE does not allow creators to set their stickers to “FREE.”

Overall, I achieved my goal of familiarizing myself more with Adobe Illustrator and I am quite satisfied with the results of my sticker sets. I learned that sometimes your initial ideas may not always match your final designs. For example, it may be easier to draw a furry animal on paper than it is on AI and I think Piko the Chick helped open my eyes to that aspect. I had to go through iterations and series of edits in order to achieve the final look.