We love using minis! Unfortunately its not easy to find ones that look like your character, and it gets rather expensive if you need an army of orcs or lizardmen!
I have purchased the "Cardboard Heroes" set from Steve Jackson games, and you get a lot of different characters for your money. When assembled according to the instructions, they tend to fall over easily, unless weighed down by something. Fortunately I found that the medium sized ones fit perfectly in the bases made for the Citadel minis by Games Workshop. The result is fairly nice looking, cheap and stable "standing counters".
If you want a standing counter that resembles your character, it is easy to downscale a drawing, printing it out and attaching a base. I make mine with plastic cover to make them sturdy. I just take a piece of plastic (from the transparent plastic boxes many tings are wrapped in when you buy them) fold it, put the printout in between and attach a base. Voila! A nice mini for the price of the paper and ink! If you are good at drawing, you can do different poses as Zaruthustran suggested. (Excellent idea btw)
For those of us who are not accomplished artist, you can find character drawings on the net, just be aware of potential copyright violations.
Just the other day I assembled 25 of these "standing counters" that I had previously printed out. Oh, and I use an old version of corel draw for setting them up on a page and printing them. With this or similar programs it's easy to make a grid to make sure they are the proper size.
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