My original intention was to just leave my paper minis more or less rectangular, not trimming them down to the shape of whatever creature they depicted. I planned this mainly because I felt it would make them more durable and easier to store – no narrow strips to be easily torn, bent, or tangled in one another.
But I really didn’t like the bulky look of the resulting figures. Giant square fields of blank white paper not only made the individual figures look oversized and cumbersome; they also served to obscure views of whatever might be on the game grid around them. So I settled on the tactic of trimming away the corners and excessive blank spaces to turn my paper figures into more rounded shapes – not enough to expose the potentially fragile bits, but enough to strip away most of the bulk.
This, in turn, made them harder to neatly stack and rubber-band together, which made my plan to store them organized by type in one of those little craft storage bins unrealistic. I ended up finding a suggestion which would not only lend itself to organizing them, but would use up one of the three-ring binders that’s been collecting dust in a pile of unused school supplies upstairs.
I found some of the clear pocketed sheets that coin and trading card collectors use to store their items and voila! – instant paper-mini organizer! A binder, a coin sheet, and a card sheet, and now every mini I’ll need (and then some) for the Phandelver campaign (and then some) are sorted and stored.
I did, however, discover one more critical step in my storage scheme:
Labels reading “This side up” on the front and side of the binder. The pockets on those sheets do have openings on the top and the minis will slide out of them if gravity compels them to. I now know this from experience, having gone through the sorting process an extra time. I’m thinking about running some scotch tape across the openings to help secure them – it’s easy to remove when I need access and easy to replace when it wears out.