Hand-Painted Dice Sets for Any Adventure! (Part 1)

Written By Koalamea Crafts
A set of dice of various shapes, with faces showing various words, colours and symbols

Decisions, Decisions!

I’ve been watching a lot of Dungeons & Dragons YouTube lately, and was inspired to obtain some dice. (I’ve played a couple of sessions of DnD in the past, and I hope to get into it again, but in the meantime they’re just nice to have.) Looking online for some, I couldn’t find any designs that I liked, and a lot of them were quite expensive. So I thought to myself “I could paint my own for cheaper than that!”

And that’s exactly what I did. (It’s worth noting that “I could make my own better/cheaper” is how a lot of my craft projects begin!)

I started by buying a pack of six sets of blank dice - three black sets and three white sets of a D4, D6, D8, two D10s, D12 and D20. (For those unfamiliar, this site gives a good explanation of these dice and what they’re for.) I decided I wanted five of the sets to be traditional numbered dice, while the sixth set would be ‘decision’ dice for making more specific decisions. As I thought these would be the simplest to paint, I attempted these first:

A set of dice of various shapes, with faces showing various words, colours and symbols

The “Decision” Set:

Two images of a tetrahedron die, its vertices depicting the sky at sunrise, sunset, midday and night

D4 – Time of day: with vertices to represent morning, afternoon, evening and night (having said this set would be the easiest, this die turned into some complex bits of scenery!)

Two images of a cube-shaped die, with each face painted as two coloured triangles; red and yellow, blue and green, silver and gold, black and white, orange and brown, purple and pink

D6 – Colours: each face shows a choice of two hues

Two images of an eight-sided die, each face painted with letters representing one of the eight compass points

D8 – Compass points: with faces showing the four cardinal and four intercardinal directions

Four images of two ten-sided dice, each face painted with a symbol to represent a kind of weather, such as sun, rain, wind or fog

D10s – Weather: one for summer weather showing high heat and showers, and one for winter weather with faces to represent heavy rain, hail and snow

Two images of a twelve-sided die, each face painted with a different emoji, such as embarrassed, scared, happy or flirtatious

D12 – Emotions: each face shows a little emoji🙂

Four images of a black twenty-sided die, with each face painted with words representing Magic 8 Ball answers, such as "concentrate", "definite", "yes" or "doubtful"

D20 – Magic 8 Ball: with faces representing all 20 answers that can be given by a Magic 8 Ball

Want to see what I’ve done with the rest of the dice? Keep an eye out for future blog posts! Next month, though, you can expect something a little different – something a bit more like a how-to – so stay tuned for that too!

Happy Crafting!

~KC🐨🧶

Koalamea Crafts
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