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