How to make paper miniatures for D&D

Paper miniatures solve the problem every in-person D&D group hits eventually: you need eight kobolds tonight, you own two, and a boxed set costs more than the session is worth. A paper mini costs a few pence, takes about two minutes to assemble, and reads perfectly well from across a table. This guide covers the print settings that actually matter, three folding styles and when to use each, how to stop the things falling over, and where to get print-ready art without drawing it yourself.

What you need

The list is short:

• Cardstock, 160-250gsm. Matte, not gloss.
• A colour printer. Inkjet or laser both work. Laser is more durable, inkjet gives richer art.
• Scissors or a craft knife. A knife and cutting mat is faster past about ten minis.
• A bone folder or a ruler for scoring fold lines. Optional, but it is the difference between a crisp mini and a rounded one.
• Glue stick or double-sided tape for the base.

That is genuinely it. No cutting machine, no lamination, no basing kit.

Get the print settings right first

This is where most first attempts go wrong, and it has nothing to do with the art.

Print at 100% scale. Every print dialog has a scaling option, and most default to “fit to page” or “shrink oversized pages”. Both will silently shrink your minis by five to ten percent. That does not sound like much until a medium creature no longer fills a 1-inch grid square and your large creatures look medium. Find the scaling dropdown, set it to 100% or “actual size”, and leave it there.

Check the paper size matches the file. A4 art printed on US Letter with auto-fit enabled gets scaled twice. If you are in the US and the pack is A4, set the printer to A4 and accept the wider margins rather than letting it rescale.

Print one test sheet before you print thirty. Measure a medium creature from base to eye. You want roughly 28mm. If it comes out at 25mm, your scaling is still on.

Use the highest quality setting for the first run. Cardstock absorbs ink differently to copy paper, and draft mode on cardstock looks washed out.

Choose a fold style

There are three common builds, and they suit different creatures.

The fold-over (most common)

The art is printed as a mirrored pair: the front at the bottom, the back upside down above it, with a fold line between. You cut around the outside, fold along that centre line, and the two halves meet back to back. Tabs at the bottom fold outward to form a base.

This is the standard for a reason. It is fast, it gives you a correct front and back so facing reads properly, and it needs no extra materials. Every mini in the free MakeMythic pack uses this build.

The tent fold

Fold the sheet into a triangular prism, with art on two faces and the third acting as a floor. More stable than a fold-over because the footprint is wider, and it suits squat or wide creatures — oozes, swarms, beasts. Less good for tall humanoids, where the triangle looks bulky.

The flat stand-up

A single-sided figure with a separate slotted base, usually cut from the same cardstock. Fastest to cut, uses the least ink, but the mini has no back, so it looks wrong from the far side of the table. Fine for a horde of identical minions where nobody is studying the individual, poor for a named NPC.

Cut, score, fold

Cut slightly outside the line. A hair of white border is far less noticeable than an accidental nick into the art. If the art has a printed outline, cut on the outer edge of it.

Score before you fold. Run the back of a craft knife, a bone folder, or the edge of a ruler along the fold line under light pressure. Scoring compresses the fibres so the card folds along a clean straight edge instead of buckling. On 250gsm this is the difference between a sharp mini and a mushy one.

Fold away from the score. Score on the inside of the fold, then bend away from it.

Line up the halves before the glue sets. If the front and back are a millimetre out, the mini reads as slightly cross-eyed from the table. Hold it for ten seconds.

Bases: the part everyone gets wrong

A paper mini falls over for one of two reasons: the base is too narrow, or the mini is too top-heavy. Both are fixable.

Match the base to the creature’s size category. Medium creatures want a 25mm base, large want 50mm. This is not just aesthetics — it means the mini physically occupies the right number of grid squares, so reach, area of effect and opportunity attacks all resolve correctly without anyone squinting at the map.

Weight anything tall. A dragon or a giant on a folded paper tab will topple every time somebody nudges the table. Glue the tab into a slotted plastic base, or onto a large washer or a 2p coin. Cheap, and it turns a fragile mini into one that survives a campaign.

Consider double-sided tape on a battle mat. A small square under the base stops accidental sweeps without damaging the mini.

If you are printing minis, you are almost certainly playing on a printed map, and the two need to agree on scale. Our guide to using a battlemap as a new DM covers getting the grid right, and the free grid overlay tool will put a correctly-scaled 1-inch grid onto any map image before you print it.

Where to get the art

You do not need to draw anything. In rough order of effort:

Free packs. MakeMythic gives away 50 print-and-fold minis — 25 monsters from CR 0 to CR 23, 10 NPCs, 15 player characters across seven races, plus base templates. It is free on Patreon and a good way to test your printer settings on real art before you buy anything. Printable Heroes has a large free library, and Itch.io hosts dozens of independent paper mini artists.

Paid packs. Buy these when you need coverage — a full bestiary rather than the six creatures you happened to find free.

Roll your own. The classic DIY method, still recommended on the D&D Beyond forums, is to drop an image into a spreadsheet cell, paste a vertically flipped copy in the cell above, and print. Crude, free, and completely serviceable for a one-off NPC. If you have Photoshop or GIMP, cutting out a Hero Forge screenshot gives you a custom PC mini in about ten minutes.

When you need the whole bestiary

Free packs are great until the session where the party fights something you did not print. That is the real argument for a bundle: not that any single mini is better, but that the creature you need at 11pm on a Friday is already in the folder.

From the shop

Printable Paper Minis Bundle

$18 $5.40

Browse on Etsy →

The Printable Paper Minis Bundle ($18 $5.40) is the same double-sided print-and-fold build as the free pack, scaled up to a full library. You can also browse the whole printable miniatures range if you want STL files for a resin printer instead.

Paper minis versus the alternatives

Versus plastic and resin. Paper wins on cost, speed and breadth. Plastic wins on durability and table presence. Most groups end up mixing: paper for hordes and one-off monsters, painted models for recurring villains and player characters.

Versus tokens. Flat tokens are faster still — no folding — but they read as counters rather than creatures, and they lose facing. Paper minis stand up, which matters more than it sounds when a player is trying to work out whether they are behind the ogre.

Versus theatre of the mind. If you run without a map at all, minis are moot. Our comparison of theatre of the mind versus battlemaps covers when each approach serves the table better.

A realistic first session

Print one test sheet and check the scale. Print eight to ten minis for tonight’s encounters. Cut them during an episode of something. Score, fold, base. Total time for ten minis: about half an hour the first time, fifteen minutes once you have the rhythm.

Then keep them. A shoebox of paper minis sorted by creature type becomes the thing you reach for every session, and it grows for pennies each time.