Grim up North Heath

Tag: board games

  • What’s new in the shop?

    What’s new in the shop?

    Recently, I updated the Facebook site and the Wix site. I designed a new banner for the shops to showcase recent designs. What I haven’t done for a while is make a new advert. But I fixed that.

    Previous adverts only had a few designs on them. This time I think I put twelve designs on, because I decided to re-use some of the videos I made a while ago and I have learned a few more tricks in CapCut.

    Heath Way Prints shop

    New banner

    This features four recent designs: One disc golf, the Vitruvian Meeple, “Stupid Euclid, stop pickin’ on me”, and “Sit on a Cake“.

    It’s only now that I’m doing this post that I realise I’ve not blogged about disc golf1. That will have to change2. I also know I’ve not written about the ‘Stupid Euclid’ design; that’s because I only completed it yesterday.

    Stupid Euclid

    The inspiration for this is pretty obvious – there’s a song from 1958 sung by Connie Francis called Stupid Cupid. Cupid and Euclid sort of rhyme. But where does an ancient Greek Philosopher, the father of geometry, come into it?

    I’m not unique in having done maths at school; it’s a compulsory subject. I took it further than most, I studied it for A level. I did OK, but I realised early on that I don’t have a maths brain. For those who do, maths lessons are an exercise in being shown the obvious. For me, I could do calculus and learned how to use the chain rule, differentiation by parts, I got the hang of surds quickly enough. But it was never a natural thing, as it is for my brother3 and oldest child4. It was more like following a recipe than knowing how to cook something.

    So Euclid, the man whose “Elements” is the oldest textbook that is still useful, personifies the trials of maths and gets to be the target for this design (white printing – black printing also available).

    Designs in the video

    Old and new designs – Game over, Outpaced by snails, Caffeine!, Blue neon meeple, “I will not be shushed” and “How did that get there?” sticker.
    Further designs – small disc golf, Quinoa and fist, ‘Sit on a cake’, Thinking about disc golf, Vitruvian Meeple and ‘Stupid Euclid’.

    I’ve blogged about some of these designs, and will write about others that I’ve missed. The Game Over design is one of my favourites; the How did that get there is popular, as is the Sit on a cake – both part of the growing Taskmaster collection.

    Heath Way Prints shop

    1. It’s like ball golf, but you throw frisbees at a basket instead of hitting a ball into a hole with a stick. ↩︎
    2. Although I’ve done a pretty full summary of the sport in the previous footnote. ↩︎
    3. Who’s a maths lecturer. ↩︎
    4. Who is about to start a Masters in Mathematics. ↩︎
  • If Leonardo da Vinci played board games

    If Leonardo da Vinci played board games

    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).

    White print Vitruvian meeple on black t-shirt.
    Black print Vitruvian meeple on white t-shirt.
    Vitruvian Meeple white print
    Vitruvian Meeple black print

    Meeple differ wildly from the pieces used in role playing games, which are detailed metal sculptures and often carefully painted by players.

    Painted figures, as used in table top role playing games. You wouldn’t normally see such models used in board games. No reason you couldn’t, though.

    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).

    Original sketch for the Vitruvian Meeple.

    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…

    Coming soon – The Village Meeple!
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