Paper miniature generator

Miniature figurines have a long history in games and storytelling. Think of chess pieces and ceramic dolls, hand puppets and marionettes. By bringing a physical item into existence, we can hold a small part of the story we're telling in our hands.

Paper miniatures are a particularly easy way to create little physical representations of characters and creatures. They're commonly associated with tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.

You can use paper miniatures however you like. You could make your own paper chess set, prototype a new board game, or print some little characters from whatever book you're reading.

You could try using the SVG printer tool I built to work alongside this tool.

If you want something different, you'll need an app that lets you paste an SVG from your clipboard, arrange it on a page, and export the page as a PDF. You can usually fit many different miniatures on a single page.

Figma is likely the easiest option if you're new to vector editing tools, although it requires an account, and it's been increasingly hard to avoid subscription payments since Adobe acquired it.

Inkscape is another option, it's free and open-source, but might have a bit more of a learning curve.

If you're printing a single miniature, you may be able to open the SVG file in your browser, and print to a PDF from your browser's print dialog.

Standard printer paper should be fine. You'll be folding the paper miniature so that every part is made up of two layers of paper and one layer of glue, so even thinner paper ends up pretty sturdy.

You'll need scissors and a glue stick.

First cut along the solid lines. You don’t have to be exact unless you want to, making precise cuts takes practice. Then fold along the dotted lines. Valley fold are marked with dotted lines, and mountain folds are marked with dash-dot lines.

Once you’re done each individual fold, fold everything into place to see how your paper miniature will look. To permanently assemble your miniature, unfold it, add glue to the entire back of the print, and then fold it back together and press things together.

Please source your images responsibly. This tool works with JPEG and PNG images. In theory other formats might work, but I haven't tested them.

Images should have a plain white or transparent background. This is helpful for tracing, and also prints nicely. If you need a way to remove a background, remove.bg works well, the small image sizes you get for free are fine for miniature sized printing.

Images should be under 1000 pixels square, otherwise things might be really slow. If you need an online image resizing tool, many have annoying ads, but Adobe Express's resize tool can be refreshing because it's just one giant ad for Adobe.

If your image isn’t working as expected, you can try tweaking the silhouette related settings to see if that helps.

Maybe not?

Using generative algorithms to create artwork is a shortcut. I think it's important to consider what you’re cutting out, and the nature of the tools you’re using.

By their nature, generative algorithms are based on existing images. To train these algorithms, for-profit companies download and process, without permission and without providing compensation, the creative work of many generations of hard-working artists. I think it's critically important to acknowledge the lifetimes of human labour that underpin these tools. The companies that build and sell these tools did not create the words and images that power them. These companies seem happy to compromise the livelihoods of the same people to whom they owe their existence, all in the name of (eventual?) profit for already-wealthy shareholders.

When you use generative algorithms, you are cutting out the artist.

It may be that some judge at some point in the future rules that training generative algorithms somehow falls under fair use, but legality is not morality, and laws in the digital space have a history of corruption. Even the most transformative and beneficial inventions can be used in exploitative ways, and so far, generative algorithms seem squarely aimed at furthering wealth inequality and worker exploitation.

You may be cutting something else out too. The value proposition of generative algorithms is that they let you skip a good chunk of the creative process. You may find that hand-drawing your own art brings a different kind of connection and meaning to what you create. No matter how “bad” you might think you are as an artist, there’s no way to know what you’re missing until you’ve personally created something you feel happy with.

I strongly believe that feeling happy with your own artwork doesn’t mean it needs to be “good” by any standard. I think that desire for “good” artwork, and protection from the feeling that we’re “bad” at something, is what drives us to use sloppy and exploitative generative tools in the first place.

If you focus on a playful and forgiving creative process, you can bake your good feelings into whatever you make, even if it doesn’t have as much lipstick as what gets spit out of an image generator.

If you've gotten something out of the many hours of work that went into this tool, you can say thanks with money. It'll help me buy food and pay rent.

If you'd like to contribute code or feedback, you can do that on GitHub, at zchsh/paper-mini-gen.

The spirit of this project is to make a tool that's free, open source, account-less, does one thing really well, and uses file formats that are highly interoperable, so that you can use it in combination with other tools. It's an attempt at taking a Unix-like philosophy to writing code for the web.

If you like writing code, I'd love to hear your thoughts, or collaborate on tools with a similar philosophy. You can reach me at hi@zch.sh.

This project relies on a bunch of open source libraries. A big thanks to maintainers of these libraries for making their work freely available.

• Jimp - used for image processing
• ImageTracerJS - used for image tracing
• FlattenSVG - used to simplify traced vectors
• Javascript Clipper - used for outlining and boolean operations

This project is open source. You can view the source code on GitHub at zchsh/paper-mini-gen.

Thanks for being here!