Color Editor Going Live! (Patreon)

Hey Everyone!

We've been hard at work on the Color Editor, early testers have had a chance to play around with it and give us feedback (thank you to everyone who stepped up to help us out with this, your feedback has been incredibly useful!), and we've finally got it to a point where we feel comfortable opening it up as a regular supported feature on the Printable Heroes website for $5+ Tier Patrons.

What is the Color Editor?
The color editor is a new feature we've added to the Printable Heroes website that allows folks to recolor Printable Heroes Miniatures straight from your web browser without the need for expensive image editing software like Photoshop.

Think of it like painting a miniature, but all of the shading has already been done for you so you only need to select which colors you want to use. Once you're satisfied with your adjustments you can add the miniature directly to the Printable Heroes built in PDF Creator (the back artwork is automatically updated to match the front artwork's colors) or download the raw Front and Back PNGs files.

Wait, $5+ Tier?! I thought it was going to be Tier $10!
Anyone who has followed the development of the Color Editor might recall that we were originally planning this to be premium content for Tier $10 Patrons.

This has been a crazy amount of work; Alex has been programming this for months and it's something I'd been taking the extra time to build my art files to support for years now in preparation. Because of the sheer amount of work involved building and supporting a tool like the Color Editor it made sense for us to approach it as a premium feature that would only be available for $10 Tier Patron supporters.

However, Printable Heroes is at it's best when I'm making art that is useful to people and Alex is using his technological wizardry to make that art more accessible. I can point to the success of the Printable Heroes website as a perfect example of that peanut butter and chocolate magic in action.

I believe the Color Editor is the latest and best example of that since the website; it's such a cool blend of Alex's skillset turning my artwork into another useful resource - folks can now customize and tell the exact stories they want to tell with their miniatures - and it's just too freakin' cool to limit it to only the fortunate few who can afford $10 a month - that would just be antithetical to my goals with PrintableHeroes; I want us to make cool stuff for as many people as possible.

So that's why we're putting it as a $5+ Patron Tier reward instead of $10+ Tier as we'd initially planned. It's my hope that $5/month strikes a better balance of being maximally accessible while still helping us cover our costs and subsidize all of the work we make available for free.

For folks who upgraded to the $10 Tier to get early access to the Color Edit and help us playtest it, we're working on discount subscriptions codes and we'll reach out to you with them as a special thanks!

The Future of the Color Miniature Editor
Right now Alex has been prioritizing the ability to edit colors, but because of how I've been building the variants miniatures we have the ability to swap art elements (changes heads, swap weapons, etc). This isn't something that is fully supported yet, but you can start playing around with it with the current iteration of the Color Editor.

Eventually we'll be building this out with a more intentional/user friendly interface and I'm really looking forward to hearing from the community what kind of stuff you'd like to see now that we have the ability to make customizing/swapping art elements possible.

Really looking forward to hearing feedback and seeing what folks start creating!

Thanks everyone!
-Marshall