Meet the Meeple
The meeple is an iconic object within the board gaming community. They are a stylised humanoid figures, used as a playing piece in board games. Slightly fancier than the pieces we used in Cludeo all those years ago, but not much.
I’ve taken the outline of the Meeple and made a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man‘, and called it ‘Vitruvian Meeple’. It’s available as a t-shirt and printed on other things (click the button to go to the shop).
Meeple differ wildly from the pieces used in role playing games, which are detailed metal sculptures and often carefully painted by players.
The design came to me after I’d spent a day at a board games convention in Worthing. My main reason for going was to get inspiration and to see if there were any other people selling printed goods to board game enthusiasts. I’d seen the meeple design before, and it has been used on t-shirts. I don’t want to do things that someone else has already done, so I know what to avoid.
Design process
The idea of the Vitruvian Meeple came to me while I was sketching out another idea – The Village Meeple – so I sketched the idea (see below).
I used Inkscape to do the design after I tried to get the design made in Canva and Blender. With Inkscape I could control and edit curves a bit more easily than in either of the other two apps. Colour changes are easy, too, so I could do the design in black, white, or any other colour for a good contrast if I want to specify a t-shirt colour.
Adding a circle (actually an ellipse, the meeple dimensions aren’t perfect) and a square was easy enough, then all I had to do was export it and do the keywords and description in RedBubble. I still find these bits difficult to do, I don’t like relying on AI to do this.
I may do another version with reverse script above and below to make it look more like the da Vinci original. This will be the deluxe version.
And as for The Village Meeple? Watch this space…
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