Starting Them Young - A Family that Terrains Together...

Anyone who's a parent knows one universal truth - kids make excellent free labor. If you can make the job fun, then you can even make them think that work is enjoyable! I decided to use that Jedi mind trick when my daughter saw that I finally made some hills out of my pink foam.

With neither of us having much experience in making hills, I decided to start slow and just do a large piece of stone. My idea was to start dark to make some natural shadows in the depressions, then do a heavy and light drybrush to give it some more color.

I got a big bag of cheap brushes from Walmart. In the future I'll probably use a brush whose bristles are either softer or more plentiful, as the thirst coat was pretty streaky.

Emma wanted to go for full-on realism and insisted on painting the bottoms as well. I was surprised that the mess was minimal!

Next came drybrushing - something that made Dad sound a bit crazy. When demonstrating how we would lightly dip the brush in the grey and then wipe it off, she gave me a very quizzical look. I tried showing her how doing that meant we'd only paint the raised areas, making it look more like a rock.

No dice. In her experience, paint is meant to be globbed on like crazy! Telling her to paint the paper towel with her brush before painting the rock seemed to be a fair compromise. Of course Daddy started having a bit too much fun and didn't notice that she was skipping the whole "towel painting" part, so the top of her rock lost most of its shadows.

We then did a mixture of white and grey, and she was super careful to wipe it off on the towel and then lightly run the brush along the edge of her rock. She finally started to see the effect of drybrushing as the hard edges of her stone became more visible. When she was done she gave me the biggest smile as she showed off her work. Of course when I went to snap the picture she added a whole bunch of cheese to the smile.

How could I have been more proud? I mean my girl has painted a miniature and a piece of terrain! She was also pretty proud of me as I showed her the rock that I worked on, but we both know whose was better.

Stone terrain was crazy-easy to paint. I mean I even have my sales pitch: "So easy a 5 year old girl can do it." We had some fun, got a bit messy, and I ended the day with two new pieces of terrain.

I strongly believe that anyone can take part in the hobby aspect of wargaming. That's dangerous to say because people pay me to do it for them, but I really think people look at masterpieces before they've picked up a brush and immediately feel inadequate. Heck, that's why I limit myself to visiting painting forums about once a week - it causes a total psych out. I really want to encourage you guys to try it for yourself - you may not win a competition, but you can still get an army on the table and have them fight on some hand-made terrain.

So look forward to the next Starting Them Young as my three year old son paints a hill and adds grass to it!


See you tomorrow!

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