Minis on the cheap

[Fitz]

I have a Call of Cthulhu campaign percolating in my brain-meats for when our current AD&D game completes its present arc, but I don't have many CoC-suitable miniatures. Buying physical 3d minis from overseas is no longer feasible, with the cost of shipping as high as it is, so I'm going in another direction: paper standees.

These all come from Okum Arts, who I found on DrveThruRPG. He has a pretty wide range of paper minis available there, and I quite like the aesthetic, which is rather like that of the animated Batman cartoons. The level of detail is well suited to this usage; more would be mostly useless I think.

I'm using 3d-printed standee-stands that I designed in Blender. The STLs are available free on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3453434 in 20, 30 and 40mm diameters.

I do still prefer to use 3d minis for player-characters if possible, and I have some Reaper figures from one of their Kickstarters that will probably do the trick for most cases. There's also the possibility of finding STLs online and printing those, though I'm not sure how much Pulp/CoC stuff there is out there.

[Fitz]

I've been considering perhaps painting my Pulp / Call of Cthulhu minis in this black & white monochrome fashion, harking back to the black & white movies of yore. It has the advantage that it's very quick and easy.

One issue with the idea is that any scatter terrain or mapping graphics I use with them should also have to be monochrome, or else they'll just look like unpainted minis.

[Freddy]

In a more boardgame-like environment 2d standees can be cool, and if you like to paint in 2d, you can design new ones (you can easily clone them and paint in whatever scale you like as you can resize them on the computer).

Tbh I am not fan of the monochrome painting in general, seems self-limiting in an art form where the endless ocean of colours is one of the biggest appeals. And yes, it is also limiting your terrain choices. But this is purely a matter of taste of course!

[ichwillauch]

I like the Okum Art a lot and had always this idea to use some of the paper miniatures to make a Star Trek -theme game because 3d miniatures are more or less unavailable. My idea was to glue them on plywood. but I like your idea using transparent bases a lot.