Paper Elemental: Making Scrabble Tiles Into Cheap RPG "Minis"

Here's how to make cheap DIY wooden standee miniatures for 10 cents each.

Snail wizard modified from Twitter Emoji; Modron modified from AD&D Monster Manual II; plastic minis from Battlelore 2e.

Instructions:

Get some Scrabble-style letter tiles.

Here's an example search query on Amazon, but you can find similar tiles pretty much anywhere for around 0.04 USD per tile.
For a bit of extra money, you can buy them pre-painted in a variety of colors. I bought the pink ones up above to make a gift for a family member, and had a bunch left over.

Glue pairs of tiles face to face to make a thicker wooden block.

(A single Scrabble tile can be balanced on it's end, but it's not very stable.)
A simple pva gluestick will do the trick. The resulting bond holds up to normal handling, but can be twisted apart.
A stronger bond can be made by scoring the surfaces and using a bit of wood glue, but I personally don't think it's worth the extra effort and mess.

Optionally: give them a couple quick coats of acrylic color.
Print out some little images of critters.

To avoid peeling, make the images slightly smaller than the size of the tiles.

For example, the scrabble tiles I bought are about 18x20mm, so I should have printed the images at about 17x19mm.

I print two images per block. One for the front, and a mirror-image for the back.
Make or select images with sharp lines and bold colors. Texture and fine detail gets washed out at this scale.
I used GIMP to crop my images and Inkscape to scale and arrange them for printing. These are both free software.

In Inkscape, you can change the default display units to mm under File > Document Properties.
In this same menu, make sure the correct page size is selected. A4 is the default.
Leave a bit of space around the edges of the page for printing margins.
Once all your images are arranged, export the file as a pdf by choosing File > Save a Copy, and changing the file type to pdf.
Print this pdf at 100% size. Don't shrink to fit it on the page.

Color printing services usually cost less than 1 USD per page; my local library charges 0.50 USD per page. You can easily fit 50 blocks worth of images onto a page, making the printing costs no more than 0.02 USD per block.

Cut out and glue the images onto the blocks.

Now you have some nice little game pieces . They're not as fancy looking as molded plastic minis, but the advantages are:

They're significantly cheaper, and easier to replace.
They are much more durable than painted minis or paper standees. You can just throw a handful of these in a box or bag without concern.
They stack nicely for compact storage.
They're pleasant and easy to handle.

Formatted Example Downloads:

Here are some downloads for the doodles I made:

Other Options for Blocks:

A slightly higher quality but more expensive option is to buy wargame blocks, which are basically designed for this purpose.

Columbia Games sells the blocks for their wargames. The price is 0.20 USD each for blocks of similar size to a doubled Scrabble tile.
The blocks in the picture below are from Command and Colors: Napoleonics, by GMT Games. It's possible to buy block sets alone from GMT, but you'll have to give them a phone call, and the cost varies.
Blocks from GMT Games. Doodles my own.

Another option I considered but haven't tried is to use Color Tiles. These are 1-inch (25mm) foam or plastic squares usually used to teach kids about math concepts.

Some Block Options that Didn't Work Out:

Art: cactusfantastico, Alex Allen

Mini Mahjong tiles: The blank tiles that came with my mahjong set gave me the inspiration for this project. The heft and feel are very nice. However, they're too expensive per unit, and a bit too thick for use on a 1-inch battle grid.
3D printed blocks: After fiddling with some settings, I was able to get stable-standing, decent looking plastic blocks to come out of a cheap 3D printer. The actual material cost per unit is remarkably low, since these are mostly hollow. But they don't take paint well, and the time to print is just too long to be practical, especially if you're playing around on a library 3D-printer like I was. Maybe this is a good option if you own your own 3D printer.
Laser-cut fiberboard: Neat shapes are possible (that's a Reuleaux pentagon!), but the results smell horrendous, and the edges are sharp and need lots of laborious sanding. Even using free scrap wood, the cost of renting laser-time meant my test pieces cost over 0.10 USD each. Also, laser cutters are scary.