Making Minis
I spent a week making paper minis and all i got was this lousy blog post
I love the idea of minis. Unfortunately, buying manufactured minis is not an option for me. It doesn't work well with the way I prep and would be WAY too expensive. One of my players has a 3D printer so I gave that a try, but as you can see it really didn't go well.
Some wrecked 3D printed minis, never got as far as removing supports without destroying some part of it.
The majority of my time playing tabletop games I have used theatre of the mind, but with my new campaign I wanted to finally start using minis and tactical combat (though not with a grid, but thats for another post for another time). So if buying minis and 3D printing minis was out I needed another option.
At first I tried sticking a little bit of paper into a standee, this worked but it wasn't a great option. The thick paper that I have at home (even triple-layered) was just too thin to fit properly in the standee, so I had to stick a liiiiiitle bit of blue tack in the bottom which wasn't fun to do.
These are okay. Its cool to see the art (I have a whole pinterest board of appropriate character art) but they are not sturdy enough and the standees are pretty lame.
That worked for the first session, and my players all mentioned that they appreciated the visual aid, but I did not want to have to deal with that going forward. After a bit of research I came across this video by JP Coovert and it seemed PERFECT. I immediately got onto Affinity Publisher and made a template for several sizes of mini, then copied in a bunch of art from my pinterest board and printed it out.
These worked out really well. I cut the minis apart using my sliding cutter board thingy (I have no idea what its called), folded along the lines and glued it together. Even though they stand on their own im working on ideas for weighing them down a little, the big ones are the perfect size for an Australian 5 cent coin so that works, for the small ones im thinking reaalllyy small paperclips.
GOD how cool are these. They stand up so well on their own and they look really great. I can even do the meeples trick for prone and dead characters.
If you want to do this yourself then here is the Affinity template I made. Theres some wierd layer stuff in there and I think it might be a bit off in some places, this was my first time using Publisher and I was learning what I was doing as I did it.
My process is copying in the art and converting it to a picture frame, then I could resize the frame and the picture to perfectly fit within the space. Duplicate the frame, flip, and then move to the adjacent space to get art on the back side (make sure that the 'feet' of the mini are against the glued space or your little guy will be upside down), then select both frames and duplicate for however many minis you want. I recommend pasting all the images into a separate layer from the shapes so that you can delete them easily without deleting part of the frame.
Theres definitely still some stuff I could do to improve the look of these, the obvious thing is working out how to change the colour range of full colour images somehow so that they dont print completely black (no im not buying a colour printer). This was such a fun process to go through over a few days, and has really inspired me to keep doing little crafts going into next year.
