Being an uncle is entertaining – you bring presents, you know all the cool stuff, and you are a lot more fun than the rest of the adults.
Since we live in the UK and my nieces (6 and 8 years old) are in Hungary, I can see them only twice a year, so I try to make every visit special and memorable. Instead of just heaping them with random gifts, I always buy something that improves their creativity or their skills. To give a few examples, we have made gypsum mermaids and butterflies and we have painted them together. I showed them how to mix colours, I explained them colour theory, and I taught them techniques like edge highlighting, drybrushing and extreme highlighting. They are always curious and receptive, and the most rewarding thing in this process is that I can see that they use what they learnt earlier.
I have a hidden agenda: step by step, I want to introduce them to miniature building and painting. I showed them photos of my work, some magazines and amazingly, I didn’t have to make a huge effort, they really wanted to give it a try. I showed them a couple of figures that I thought they could paint easily, but they wanted a gryphon! I have to admit that I was surprised to learn that they know about gryphons at all. Unfortunately, the gryphon minis I knew about were too big and complex to finish in a single weekend, but luckily they were OK with GW’s Gryph-hounds.
I had a lot of things to do before our visit: buying the figures (easy), preparing a minimalistic toolkit (medium) and all the paints we would need (challenging), and doing this without filling a whole suitcase with modelling supplies (nearly impossible). I also had to come up with a paint scheme that is achievable and fun for 6 and 8 years old kids, and one that looks good in the end. Luckily, they have good taste: the younger one’s favourite colours are blue and silver, while the older one’s are red and gold (oh wait… is she a Blood Angels fan? Or Khorne??). These are nice combinations, I had plenty of red and blue shades and had the matching washes too. In order to save time, I degreased the sprues, covered two round bases with PVA and grit and painted them black – structured bases look better than plain ones, but waiting for the glue to cure is not too much fun. After a couple of attempts, I could fit everything into a one-liter plastic container and I still had some room for skulls and self-adhesive turf to decorate the bases.
Finally, the big day have come and it was hard to tell who was more excited: them or me. Each of them picked a gryph-hound, we cut the parts from the sprues, glued them together, removed the mould lines with a small file and started painting.
I spent plenty of time thinking about it and I figured that a basecoat – wash – drybrush combination could probably work well on these minis, and these were simple and quick techniques that they were already familiar with.
We used the following colours:
Blue gryph-dog:
Red gryph-dog:
I helped with painting the metal ornaments, the eyes and the tongue, but everything else was done by the girls! In order to provide protection, both figures got a layer of Lahmian medium. As finishing touches, the older one added a skull commenting that “The skulls are so cute!” (Khorne must really be behind this! 😊) and some tuft to the base, while the younger one added some snow (baking soda mixed with PVA).
All this was done in one afternoon, we had an amazing time and everyone was happy with the result.
Mission accomplished: the girls have built and painted their first minis, there’s no turning back now.
Coming soon: The real gryphon!