Making Custom Dice (and other pieces)

I’ve tried every method for producing custom dice I can think of—hand drawn stickers, printer stickers, a label maker, iron on paper—but the best method by far has been spray painting with a plastic stencil.

It takes slightly longer than printer paper stickers or a label maker, but the results look far better.

A red die with black markings of an X, a 3, and a 4. The markings were
made by a stencil.

The Process

I’ve adjusted my process quite a bit, so I’m recording it here for others.

The base coat

I start with blank wood dice, preferably 14mm, but you can use any size you’d like. Some will be misshapen, and you’ll need to filter any that seem unusable, but for a prototype I don’t mind.

The paint you use will affect how the surface of your dice feels. For the base coat, I like to use satin paints by Rust-oleum.

Painting the dice is simple: Follow the instructions for your paint, paint one side, and then the other.

Two blank wood dice—one painted red, one plain

Prepping the stencil

You need a stencil with small symbols. I use this one, and I’m happy with it.

A plastic stencil of small letters, numbers, and symbols.

Cut a hole in a sheet of card-stock to protect most of the stencil from paint and prevent other symbols from passing through to the dice. The easiest way to do this is by tracing the intended symbol with a pen on the card-stock and cutting around the tracing.

A letter-sized sheet of card-stock with a small rectangle cut out. The
sheet is sitting on a cutting mat and has an exacto knife sitting on
it.

Now tape the stencil to the card-stock so that your intended symbol shows through.

A hole in card-stock with the view of a cutout of the number 1 from the
plastic stencil.

Alignment

Aligning the stencil with the center of the die-face is the most involved part. I start by using a sharpie to place a dot on the center of the die face (or slightly offset if the symbol requires it). The dot will help to quickly align the stencil and should be painted over by the end.

Around 50 red, painted dice with a small black dot in the center of one
face.

To keep the dice still, I built a platform with card-stock, dice, and a piece of paper towel. I taped the dice to the card-stock to hold the stencil up and the target die in place.

A letter sized piece of card-stock with blank dice taped down at the four
corners. Four dice are taped in a cluster with space for a single die
in-between. A wad of paper towel can be seen in the hole created by the
cluster of dice.

A small piece of paper towel under the target die lifts it just slightly so that the stencil sits flush across the die’s surface.

A close up of the cluster of dice. A red painted die sits in-between them
slightly higher than the rest, lifted by the wad of paper
towel.

Once you have the stencil and the platform, the dice painting should go by quick. Place the die with the dotted side up, place the stencil, align it using the dot, and spray through the stencil.

Don’t over-paint the symbol, or it will bleed.
You can remove the stencil immediately, but try to lift it straight up.
Have a paper towel ready to wipe and blot the stencil on occasion.
Adjust your spray distance if necessary.
You will screw up a few, but you can always repaint them later.

The result and binning

Once you’ve painted every face, you’ll need to inspect the dice for mistakes. I find it’s best to create about 20% more dice than I think I’ll need.

A cup of fully painted dice.

With the mistakes, I either throw them back into circulation to be repainted later or I “bin” them. With binning, the best dice are used for my best prototype—the one I will send to a publisher—while the second best are used for my blind test copies, and the worst (but still usable) are kept for my own copy.

Other Components, Other Methods

You can spray paint more components than you may realize. Like these chipboard tokens I made:

Painted, circular, chipboard tokens.

I own a Cricut, which I occasionally use to make a custom stencil out of card-stock. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it over a Brother Scan-n-Cut, but I’ve kept it working (with some effort).

A $1 hole cut in cardstock

When I’m painting flat objects, I don’t use a platform to hold them in place and I don’t bother with the dot. Instead, I cut “alignment windows” in the card-stock so that I can see if I’m too far off to one side. The windows are slightly further out than the edge of the tokens, such that any paint that passes through them shouldn’t transfer to the token.

The same $1 stencil but with four rectangles cut out off to each
direction. The cut-outs start further out than the size of the
tokens.

Practice

I’ve left out a lot of details that I suspect are easier to learn from experience. The important take away is that building a prototype by hand is a process that is worth developing. The prototype that I built these dice for required 50 dice in each copy, and so far I’ve built 3 different copies. Having a faster process has saved me real time and allowed me to iterate on ideas more quickly.