Paper Mini Bases (Other Than Binder Clips)

For lack of a large collection of real miniatures for D&D, I’ve been using paper minis and mounting them on binder clips. This works fairly well for a gameplay, but the binder clips have one annoying disadvantage: it’s kind of a pain to remove those little arms after inserting a mini, then to re-install them to pull the mini out, and repeat the process over and over again.

I’ve seen a number of tutorials for building bases that end up having the paper minis permanently attached to them, but that defeats the storage advantage of using paper. I want my bases and minis to be easy to swap out, preferably without either one being routinely damaged in the process.

So based on these requirements and inspired by my recent fascination with dungeon-crafting videos, my current experiment looks something like this:

I started with some scraps of 1/2″ XPS insulation foam and a sheet of dollar-store foam with the paper stripped off, because I wanted to try different materials to see if any worked better or worse than the other. For the XPS foam I cut it on my hot wire tool using a circle jig and then sliced the circles roughly in half. My relative inexperience with the cutter resulted in not-very-uniform diameters and thicknesses among the resulting proto-bases. For the regular craft foam, I just took a 1″ punch tool and pounded it into the foam a couple of times. This didn’t necessarily do nice things to the foam as the punch isn’t really sharp and kind of mashed its way through… but that wasn’t a problem for this usage.

I had some 1″ washers left from my earlier flat token projects, so I glued one to an XPS disk and one to a white foam disk. In the interest of trying a variety of configurations, I also took one of each foam type and glued them to flat wooden circles of just slightly under 1″ diameter from a bag of assorted bits from a craft store.

So I ended up with four test bases that looked something like this:

The next step was to take a Dremel tool to grind down the edges a bit. (This creates a lot of dust and foam dust is not a nice thing to have in one’s lungs, so I made sure to do this outside with a dust mask on.) This didn’t require any finesse or exacting detail – I wanted a non-uniform look, so uneven surfaces and blockiness were intentional.

As the pictures above show, the washers under two of the bases jutted out a little because of my, er, size issues. Rather than leave them with what would appear as a ledge of some sort at the bottom of the final product, I used a hot glue gun to draw a bead of glue around the edges and blend it into the sides of the foam. The picture I hastily took of this came out blurry, but there’s a sort-of-visible clear, shiny surface around the edges where the glue went.

The next step was to strengthen and seal the foam with a coat of matte Mod Podge mixed with cheap acrylic black paint, as shown below in glorious blur-O-vision.

A few hours later when I was sure the Mod Podge was completely dry, I mixed some white glue with a few drops of water to make it more easily spreadable. I painted this onto the top and sides of all four of my test bases and dipped them into some dollar-store craft sand. The sand I used was fairly dark and I think I’d prefer to use a lighter one in the future, but it’s what I had on hand at the time.

Once the glue was fully set, I gave them each a light coat of a dark brown paint, followed by my first attempt at a dry-brush of green, with intention of creating a base that looked like a grassy patch of earth. The results came out very dark and I’m not entirely satisfied with them – they’re darker than I intended and the green doesn’t show very well. As I make more bases I’ll probably tinker with different paint colors and techniques, and my wife (who has some actual artistic talent) has some ideas she wants to try on the test batch. I’ll probably try to achieve something closer to a slab-of-stone look on a few as well.

While painting the bases I had trouble with some of the sand coming loose, so I ended up coating the whole assembly with more Mod Podge – this time without paint, so it dries clear. This seems to have worked to secure the sand, but apparently create something closer to a semi-gloss finish than a flat one. After my wife does her tinkering with the colors, I may consider a layer of flat spray sealant to tone down the shine.

While this is still a work-in-progress on the artistic side, it looks so far to be a success on the practical side. A razor-knife slice through the foam of each disk left a slot for swapping minis in and out with relative ease, while maintaining enough clamping pressure to keep them in place and a weighted bottom to keep them from falling over. It remains to be seen how they’ll wear over time, but hopefully the mass of Mod Podge in there will help with the durability.

(Yeah, the bottoms of the minis themselves are sized for fitting well into the binder clips, and will have to be trimmed a bit.)

As I type this, a wax-paper sheet nearby holds another dozen or so drying base-coated 1″ soon-to-be-mini-bases… as well as a few 2″ ones for large-monster minis and a 3″ one for that green dragon…