Here be Dragons

From time to time, my 4 year old daughter catches me in my minis cupboard, and sometimes asks to see them and or play with them. Mostly they are unpainted, so I let her play with them. However on Saturday, we had some time to ourselves, and it came about that she wanted to paint some with me. Who am I to argue? So out came the brushes and paints.

She wanted to paint one of the ladies (she has little or no interest in the male figures). The 'lady' I offered her to paint, was the middle one of these models from Reaper. However, she needed to be undercoated, so I explained undercoat to her and I slapped on a coat of Gesso, then we left the mini outside to dry. Meanwhile I asked her if she wanted to paint a dragon, and showed her one of my shredders of which I have many, and all but 2 are painted (even those two were a birthday gift from a friend and came to me painted). She was all for painting a dragon, and set about choosing her colours. Here are the results. She did all the basing herself (I only helped by getting the grass and flowers off the packaging they came in).

She saw the number on the back of the base of the shredder I was painting and asked about it (when you run 8 unpainted shredders, you need to be able to distinguish between them), then told me the number of hers would be 41. Also, I asked her what it would be called, to which she replied without hesitation 'Rosie', so Rosie it is.

My effort, painted whilst she was doing hers. She wanted to know why I was only painting with one colour when I had so many to choose from. Another session and he'll be finished. Not yet sure what colour scheme I'll be going with on my Everblight beasties, but the shredders are great little minis to try things out with.

This is the lady she wanted to paint from Reaper. However, after looking at it once it was dry she noticed bits she had missed. We had to put the paints away as her little sister had woken from her nap (and we needed the kitchen table for lunch), so I'm sure there'll be another session to finish this mini. I may have to go looking for other minis, maybe in a larger scale, for her to paint in the future.

As to gaming, that may be a step too far as yet, but we'll see. She has an interest in gaming (board games etc) like all children do, but she may not be ready for wargaming yet. I don't want to push it on her either. If anything I'd try her on RPGs first, as they can get the imagination flowing without necessarily being based on bloody conflict. Anyone out there got similar experience on introducing youngsters to the hobby?