Ebbles Miniatures is the name of the website and the line of models created by me, Christopher Roe. I'm a 35 year old jack-of-all-trades, and "Mel Ebbles" is my pen name. I started doing this professionally in September of 2003, launching my first product on RPGNow. To my astonishment, there was actually a market for the kind of models that I wanted to do, and I was soon selling enough to do it full-time. Next thing I know, it's 2007 and I'm still having a blast designing those models.

My wife provides a lot of encouragement, moral support, ideas, and helps out around the office when I'm swamped. When we start doing more video tutorials and things of that nature, she'll be doing the voice-overs in order to spare you from the horror of my atrocious accent. Incidentally, a lot of how the 2007 Bug War stuff turned out is due to her ideas, which are most often presented when she drags me outside to look at some horrifying Texas insect the size of a dinner plate. When she revives me with the smelling salts a few minutes later, she'll then brightly say, "Wouldn't that make a great paper bug?" Oh, I love this woman.

I do most of the technical stuff around here. Web design, customer support, model design, marketing, you name it. I don't have a literal  staff, but my cat would probably beg to differ. Bug hired herself as a Quality Assurance specialist when she was a kitten. Small models and parts were always disappearing, and my wife would find their tattered remains tucked away in dark corners. She's not a kitten anymore, and apparently has promoted herself to the role of office supervisor. Now she likes to sleep on the equipment, imperiously remind me when it's time to take a break (to pet the cat, of course), and she'll examine the workbench stuff like a jeweler checking out a rock under a loupe. At least she doesn't run off with the models with gruesome fates in mind for them anymore.

Bug now has a QA intern under her wing: my wife's cat Speckles. In addition to sleeping on the equipment, Speckles likes to help with various tasks around the office. By "help", I mean, of course, "hinder my efforts to do anything productive to the best of his ability." He also likes to crawl behind the Craft ROBO and bat at the paper while it feeds back and forth, accost the printer while it's working, and nap on a pile of unassembled parts when he takes a break from being endearingly annoying.

It's nice to be self-employed. Being practically stone deaf, it was difficult to find work that wasn't unfulfilling, demeaning, or depressingly menial. After several adventurous years at the bottom of the employment ladder, doing everything from delivering pizzas to disposing of biohazardous material at a large hospital, I decided I needed a boss who would put me to work in ways that utilized my capabilities to their fullest, and I realized one day that I was looking at that boss in the mirror. After that, it was just a matter of deciding what I wanted to do, and I found it in Ebbles Miniatures. That's the short version of the story.

If you want the more detailed version of the Ebbles Miniatures history, you can check out the History page here.

If you want a look at what needs to be done to create a paper model, from concept to final printing, check out the Design Process article here.