Painting the Smoke & Mirrors Box Set

The Colette Crew - Malifaux figures from Wyrd Games

One L, two T's...Colette and the Smoke and Mirrors box set, is the final Master to round out my Malifaux Arcanist colecttion (see what I did there?).

There is lots more of this stuff on my Malifaux pages

Currently most of the painted examples I can find online are of the old metal crew, so this may be one of the first walk-throughs of the plastic set online?

The figures, as usual, go together fairly well but the number of tiny pieces, most of which are such that it is difficult to understand why they were separate, is a tad frustrating. This is Cassandra in the bare plastic. To tie this crew in with all of my other crews I have adopted the same basic basing (black painted sand, with drybrush highlights) but all of the girls will be based on a patch of "stage floorboards", which I have cut out of the Renedra bases that came with my Perry 28mm Medievals. The Rendra bases are easy to cut and score (which is where the "floorboard" effect comes from) and also have a little texture on one side which helps make them take a drybrushing better.

This then is the whole set (apart from the birds - more of them later) in the plastic - I also bought a pair of Coryphee to paint up at the same time. Once assembled there was a bit of filling to do, especially around the neck and arm joints of Cassandra and Colette herself - you can just about make out where the filler has been added in this photo. All are glued to the bases with poly liquid cement - I used a brush-on bottle from Humbrol. This welds the figures to the plastic flooring bases, although in the case of the standing Coryphee I added a few blocks of plastic (cut from the sprue) behind her so her skirt rested on two more anchor points, as otherwise the one-legged stance and one thin ankle looked to me to be a very dainty and breakable spot on quite a hefty model that needed to be used in a tabletop game. It also has been magnetized - again more later...

In order to be able to use the Coryphee Duet ability (putting both Coryphee on a single bigger base) without forking out another £11 for 2 models I planned to take advantage of the wooden plank basing and do some clever mini magnet stuff.

As you can see here, before gluing the models to the bases, both bases have had a bit scraped out of their undersides, into which has been superglued a tiny (1mm thick by 3mm across!) magnet that I got on eBay so that it is pretty much flush with the base, but more importantly, was level. Once this was dry (and firmly in place) I placed a small sheet of paper or thin card over the magnet, then attached another magnet to the first one through the paper, put a dab of superglue onto this new magnet then positioned the whole thing where I wanted the flooring base to go on the 40mm Coryphee bases and held it there until it the glue was stuck. Hey Presto - a paired magnet that is in the right place on the 40mm base to magnetize the model to the base. This then got repeated for the Duet 50mm base, with the magnets glued in place such that the two pieces of flooring fitted together.

I'm not 100% sure the extra layer of card made much difference, but it did prevent the 2 magnets getting accidentally glued together if the glue ran, and also made it slightly easier to lift the model and its flooring base off of the actual base.