Following on from a previous post about meeple and designs featuring these things, I’ve made more meeple-related stuff for my RedBubble shop.
As well as the da Vinci inspired designs (plain and with text), there’s a multiple meeple and a meeple of meeples.
What’s a meeple when it’s at home?
The meeple is an iconic figure within the board gaming community. They are a humanoid (or other-oid) playing piece that originated in the game Carcassone, but they escaped the confines of the game and now appear everywhere that board games appear.
After the da Vinci ‘Vitruvian Meeple‘ design, I made a meeple of meeples and what started as just a load of meeples but ended up with a Parklife-inspired slogan.
Meeple of Meeples
I turned to Blender to make both designs. With the meeple original as a .svg (Scalable vector graphic) I imported this to Blender. After some faffing around, I created a solid meeple, ready for manipulation.
I used a geometry nodes set-up. The original curve that I imported became the framework for the design. The solid meeple that I made is then distributed around the curve. A bit of jiggery-pokery and the meeple point outwards1. I learned how to randomise colour when I made the wizard’s workshop. I applied this technique to the 42 meeple, and the design was ready.
Parklife!
There are a lot of meeple in the Parklife design. 232, to be exact.
For a few years in the 90s, Blur’s song Parklife was everywhere. With narration by Phil Daniels, it is an ode to the joys of easy access to a public park and the importance of regular exercise. But not jogging.
As a side note, the white outline version of this is the 100th design on the shop. Go me!
The basic Meeple that I used for the Meeple of Meeples was used again. This time, a function called Array was used to make about 200 Meeples in an offset pattern. The same setup for random colours was the same shader node setup as for the Meeple of Meeples.
We the Meeple
With the 250th birthday of the USA coming up, what better way to celebrate than with a Meeple flag? Go on, name one better way!
The Array function was my friend here, again. It’s a 9 x 7 array of Meeples with colours added to make a sort-of stars and stripes pattern.
This flag isn’t on the Redbubble shop. Redbubble don’t do flags, so I’ve expanded to using Printify as an additional supplier and I’ve set up another shop on the WordPress site. I’ll be adding designs there over the next few weeks.
The plan is to keep the RedBubble shop as my main site for designs, with the shop here on Grim Up North Heath for special items such as flags, bandanas and embroidered items.
And the Village Meeple are also on the shop, but that’s another post.
- I will do a video to explain how all this was done. ↩︎
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