Painting cheek by jowl... Gladiators

Last Sunday I had a very pleasant painting session because our elder daughter Viktoria joined me. Overall she's an artistic character. She doesn't play on her own too much but prefers to paint or tinker things. Thus she has a bunch of colouring books and has been fascinated by daddy's figures for a long time. During the last year she started with some old GW archers but always wanted to have "those iron ones". Finally this weekend we unwraped a set of four gladiators by Crusader miniatures that I grapped from a second hand table on Crisis 2014 and started painting them:

So we has three murmillos and one crupellasrius to paint. A perfect topic for her since gladiators are her hobbyhorse since we visited some at Xanten 2014. Maybe unusual for a (nearly) five year old girl but those ancient warriors are still fascinating for her. She's even able to differentiate most of them.

Anyway enough fatherly pride (for now). Here's what we did:

I'm really excited about her results. Upon my word I didn't help her much. Actually I gave her hints where to paint which colour and checked the small gaps and niches afterwards. But by far most of the work was hers. Alas she didn't dare to drybrush the armour because she was afraid of painting over everything. But far most important I enjoyed to spend time with Viktoria. I don't know whether she'll keep the interest in painting miniatures or spending time with me and my miniatures but as long as she does I'll enjoy it. Honestly I will not try to force her into my hobby but at least now she's keen on walking me to our gaming gatherings when she's older...