Customizing Paper Miniatures with GIMP (free)

Good day, ladies and gents. I'd like to do a brief tutorial on how to customize paper minis in GIMP, which is a free program that allows you to do this. It's really quite simple. Here's quick example of a Sanity Studios militia figure:

1. Load up GIMP.
2. Open your PDF file or picture file.
3. Press F to get the Free Hand Tool or "Lasso" as I like to call it.
4. Trace around the area you want colored. It will probably take several sections at a time and a little patience. Remember, there are two sides to each mini!

5. Next you go to colors and go to "colorize" (as seen in the above picture).

6. Now use the color slider bar to get your mini just how you want it. In this case, purple, my favorite color! My niece once said "but that's not a man's color!" Humph I say!

7. And Bob's your uncle! You're finished.

It will even save your colorization option, just select the date from the drop down bar and boom, no need to try and get your slider bar to perfectly match the color you want on another figure.

A note on gimp. I like to use GIMP to make sheets of figures I want multiples of. Instead of printing off multiple pages for just one or two figures, I'll just make a new page 8.5" x 11" then use the select tool, Ctrl C, and pop it onto the new page with Ctrl V. It does slightly shrink the image for some reason but it's not super noticeable.

Hope this helped out!

Paper Miniature Tutorial: How I do it!

 There are many ways you can cut out paper miniatures. Anything from just cutting out a rough shape with a white background to an automatic cutting machine that will cut super close...While I do own the latter, I prefer the method below.

A rogues gallery...Art by David Okum

Mini terrain tutorial and a picture of my small village...

 So I was walking through the garden section at Wal-Mart when I came across one of these buggers...

Miracle-Gro GrowAbles seed pod

 Of course, being the miniature guru that I am, I thought if I flipped it over it would make a great stone marker! Maybe an objective, statue, magical stone, etc. So I picked up a couple and ever since then I've been on a terrain binge. Here's how I did it!

Step 1: Open up the pod and dig out the dirt and seeds...You don't want that stuff in there on the battlefield, I think there's animal poop in there!...Or maybe you do, that's your business!

Step 2: You can optionally add a base like I did or simply leave it as is. There's a nice lip around it if you don't want to have a base.

Step 3: Prime and paint however you like! Looking back at it now, I might repaint it but for now, it's okay.

 Total time, about 20 minutes for two of the suckers. Here's the end result...Nothing super spectacular but was a nice little terrain piece for cheap and little work.

All done! As you can see, the little design kind of makes it look of elvish perhaps...

Charge the blurry dwarf!

And finally, I've always admired the houses in my Warhammer Fantasy Battles 3rd Edition rule book and I wanted a small village of my own in a similar make. I managed to find a couple good templates, set to work cobbling some cardboard together with hot glue, texturing with wall filler, thatch roofed it with hot glue, and slapped some paint on it. Very happy with the results!

Needs some orc invaders!

 Thanks for having a look!