Putting on a show

Welcome to part two of my little Malifaux project. I’ve already (It’s quick for me – ok!) finished my first model, so I thought I’d give a brief introduction to my crew and then show off my work so far.

Crews in Malifaux are build around named characters called “masters” (unless you play smaller games, in which case you can use a “henchman”). Masters are the most powerful units in the game, and often quite specialized, so your choice of leader has a large impact on the way you play. I went with Colette Du Bois – an ex-pickpocket turned theater owner and secret master smuggler for a magical underground crime syndicate/rebellion called The Arcanists.

Colette is a bit of a “control master”. She’s very difficult to kill (if played correctly) and capable of teleporting all around the board, but her main forte is getting the best out of the rest of her crew.

The masters come in boxes with a small thematic crew and as you can see Colette’s crew is mostly made up of ladies and magical/mechanical dolls in pretty dresses. These are all part of her smuggling operation (as well as being performers in her theater), and though they are quite capable of handling themselves, the crew, as it is out of the box, is slightly light on heavy-hitters. Cassandra (the lady in the red dress holding a giant sword) is widely regarded as one of the best units in the game (too bad you can only have one of her), and she can certainly kick ass, but I’ll probably still add a few more “killy” units to the crew at some point, to balance it out a bit.

I’m honestly not entirely sure why I was drawn to this particular crew. Maybe it’s because I always used to play blue/black or blue/red control when I was into Magic the Gathering, and this crew is kinda like that, or maybe it’s simply to get to paint something completely different from my usual dwarves and skaven.

Anyway, onwards to the painting…

I thought I’d begin with one of the “performers” – Colette’s basic minion.

I decided I’d stick fairly closely to the paint-scheme on the box, which led to a surprisingly heated discussion with my wife over whether her skirt is blue or green – it was a veritable blue dress/gold dress situation.

Coming to the conclusion that my wife is obviously color-blind (and what do women know about colors anyway), I ended up painting it blue.

I’m fairly pleased with the end result, though I did make a number of mistakes. For example: Wyrd’s figures are closer to realistic proportions than Citadel’s, which means that their eyes are quite small. Much to my later chagrin, I stuck to my usual procedure of painting the skin first, and then painting in the eyes. This proved to be extremely difficult, and I only achieved an acceptable result after an hour of painstaking work. Next time I’ll do the eyes first and paint the skin in around them, which should be much quicker.

Croaker.