Blues

Yes, it's a post about That Which Shall Not Be Named. I'm trying not to take chances here.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but I am in the deep doo-doo. All my working life I've worked at the family business, which is a small holiday park. In recent years, following the death of my father, it's been tough to keep the place going but we were just about managing. Part of that involves keeping an eye on my mother, who is getting on a bit. She lives, with me, in the family home which is the main base of operations for the business.

Now in the UK, within the next few weeks, people over 70 will be advised to isolate themselves. In our case, isolating my mother without also isolating me right in with her is going to be basically impossible. On top of that, our home office, including all the computers, files, accounts, the damn safe etc. is right in here with us. On top of that, my extended family who live next door have two members, my sister and her son, who are both very high risk for infections, and they'll probably be isolating too.

We've got a plan to keep going, but it's going to be touch-and-go. Basically, it's not at all unlikely that by the time this whole thing is over, I'm not going to have a job, a business or any income to speak of. I'm not going to rant and rave here about the UK Government response or the level of support they're giving us, because it's still very much early days, I don't know how things will shake out and I do know that the people advising the Government know a hell of a lot more about these things than I do.

However.

I'm not going to sugar-coat this- I'm bloody terrified. I have literally no idea what my life is going to look like in a few months. I truly envy those of us in our community who can just view the lockdowns and quarantines as a chance to catch up on some painting or reading. For me, those things are going to be about all I have to try to keep me calm- and believe me, right now, I am most definitely not calm. Even when my father died, in an accident that played out right in front of me, we at least had some idea what we were doing next. This time, there's no map and only the loosest of plans.

I'm truly hoping that I'll look back on this post in a few months time and laugh about how worried I was. But right now, for all of my vaunted imagination, I can't picture that scenario.

Now there is one thing you, the reader, could do for me which would very slightly help. As you will probably be able to see from the side-bar, I'm an aspiring author. It's fair to say my books haven't exactly set the world on fire so far, and I've been trying to save for a proper publicity campaign. Obviously any thought of that has gone out of the window for the time being. Over on the main site for my books, I've been building up some artwork ready to commission some pros, but other than that I can't see myself being able to afford, or mentally focus on, anything else of the sort right now.

Hopefully more like this to come, if I can draw without having a mild panic attack!

So simply put, it'd help an enormous amount if a few people who've been kind enough to read this far would pick up a copy of the first book, read it, and review it, either on Amazon or on sites like Goodreads. All three books are free through Kindle Unlimited, if you're a member of that. I make basically nothing on book sales, but a few more reviews (especially of the third book, if anyone makes it that far) would mean a huge amount for me and would provide a real morale boost.

Regardless, I greatly appreciate anyone who's read this, and know that if you have the misfortune to be caught up in the current crisis, my thoughts are with you. Let's hope that there is a light at the end of the dark tunnel we now find ourselves in.

Sister-Bashing

I've been beavering away on my Sisters of Battle for the last few weeks, and as a Valorous Heart player let me first say that the recent Marine nerfs tweaks have cheered me up considerably.*

Since I've almost finished replacing all my old metal Sisters with plastic ones, I thought it was about time to talk about the options available for kit-bashing them. At first glance, the new kits seem a tricky prospect for conversions. Other than the angle of the heads, each Sister is largely mono-pose, and even with the heads you have to be a bit careful with some of those with longer hair, since that can make certain positions not fit correctly. On top of that, their robes and sleeves, which were long rumoured to have delayed the plastic Sisters in development, cause some issues with arm swaps.

On the other hand, there are several very good reasons why you would want to convert them. Most notably, several of the models in the base kit are very distinctive, such as the Sister pulling a grenade with her teeth (an alt-build of the squad's Heavy Bolter), the sister pointing with a slung bolter (an alt of the Heavy Flamer) and my pet hate, the Simulacrum Sister's alt build. This model has her bolter slung at her back, so the alt build if you don't want the Simulacrum has her holding her helmet under one arm and levelling a bolt pistol. It looks cool, but I can't think of any situation where you'd want to be using a pistol rather than a bolter whilst the enemy was far enough away that you'd be happy tucking your helmet under your arm.

The real issue, though, odd tactical choices aside, is that these very individual models can look deeply odd if repeated several times throughout the army. For example, let's take a look at this model from the Celestians that are pictured at the top there:

Yes, this is a crop from the other picture. Yes, I'm lazy.

She has a bionic right arm and also a partially bionic head, which I've chosen to paint to suggest her right eye is also artificial. The thing is that the bionic arm is the only way to build that particular Sister, and these are the only two bionic parts (other than a few eyes) in the kit, which starts to look more than a little bizarre if replicated across five or so squads. So let's look at a few of the other Celestians to see some of the tricks we can use to make the models a bit more diverse.

The Sister Superior is a particular problem because she's stuck in a very distinct pose. By default, all the Superiors are brandishing a melee weapon or Chaplet in the left hand, and holding a ranged weapon low in the right. To make the Celestian Superior stand out a bit, I added the backpack icon from the Retributor Superior and made a variant combi-weapon. By slightly cutting down the plasma part of the gun, and the bolter part of the Condemnor Bolter we can make this version with a drum magazine. I also used a different backpack from the squad- you can interchange all of the backpacks that have the same shape hole, with the ones that have a smaller square hole being designed for specific bodies where they have to fit slightly differently to accommodate the robes. 

Silly pet-hate bit: You may notice the bolt pistol on her left hip is not the one designed for the Superior, which sets butt-backwards, but is instead the basic Sister one, which on this model sits butt-forwards. Since the pistol is meant to be used with her sword, so in her right hand, the stock build would be almost impossible to draw so I make this change on all my Superiors.

As an aside, if you're planning a Sisters army and have any intention of using Retributors, I strongly suggest starting with two boxes of them. This gives you four of each weapon, allowing you to build two squads with a unified load-out or, possibly more usefully, to make one Retributor squad and then use the other Superior and heavy weapons in your Sisters squads, allowing for more variety and conversions. The Retributor Superior is especially helpful, as we'll see, because she holds her melee and ranged weapons in the opposite hands.

This Celestian, who I've nicknamed Sister Harriet for reasons that will be clear to anyone who's recently watched Amazon's Nazi-hunting series 'Hunters', is a favourite of mine. She's using the Simulacrum Sister's bolt pistol in her left hand, and the Sister Superior's bolter in the right. The upper arms are taken from the arms which would usually hold heavy weapons, which is an extremely useful trick.

One of the more surprising things about the kits is that the heavy weapon arms will fit on almost any body. You need to check that the backpack hole is compatible and you may need to slightly shave a few parts, but as we can see from this advancing Celestian it otherwise works pretty well. It's also worth pointing out that the gun here is from the Retributors and I actually used the Retributor body for the bionic Sister we looked at first. Let's look at one more Celestian before I move on to a few other models:

This Sister is a nice example of a very simple conversion that uses a couple of odd parts. She has her Celestian helm tucked under her arm (taken from the Simulacrum Sister) but rather than shooting with the other arm she's using the slung bolter from the Heavy Flamer's alt build. This gives her a nice 'at rest' look, though it does also give her two Chaplets, so I painted the extra one differently to suggest it's a keepsake from another Order.

Moving on, here we have a bit of a 'greatest hits' from some of my other squads. To talk about a few of them quite quickly, up the top there we have a model with the scoped bolter which is a simple body-swap to get that distinctive gun on a different model**, and 'Sister Bond', replicating the famous pose but with a grenade in her off-hand because she's more badass than some Mi6 agent. These two were built at the same time, which is usually good practice with arm-swaps, and Sister Bond's bolter arm is once again using a heavy weapon arm as the base. At the bottom left the Sister Superior is using weapons from the Retributor Superior which makes her pose significantly different. The chainsword strapped to her hip is taken from one of the plastic Horus Heresy boxes.

The model at the top-right, which now I look at it is in terrible focus, is the simplest possible 'fix' for the Simulacrum sister. Rather than the arm with the helmet, she's using the grenade-throwing arm, which is a far more sensible thing to be getting up to with the enemy in pistol range. At the top left, which I'll not show in close-up for the same reason, is a Superior made using the Heavy Flamer's alt-build. I kept the pointing finger since it made sense, but added the slung bolter from the Retributor Superior and the chainsword from the normal Sister Superior, once again attached to a spare heavy weapon arm.

This model is again nothing more than an arm-swap, but I think it came out particularly well. She's using the other grenade arm which she's pulling with her teeth, which actually lines up fine with most bodies, though you have to remove the alignment peg from the head. Once again I used the slung bolter, but this time since the model's Chaplet is on her belt I was able to snip it off cleanly, which is why the one on her bolter is painted in the standard scheme.

Finally for this piece, my most extensive conversion for the Sisters so far is this Palatine. Old-school Sisters players will remember Palatines as a rank between Canonesses and Sisters Superior, which for some reason GW seem to have forgotten about. With my Sisters, I consider any Canoness who isn't the Warlord to be a Palatine instead. This model, built to be a Palatine with a Blessed Blade, is another conversion from the Simulacrum Sister, but with forearms taken from a Sister of Silence. To this I also added another backpack icon from the Retributor Superior, and a couple of spare purity seals which also come with the Retributor kit.*** To disguise the pet rock on her base, I added some statue rubble made by cruelly dismembering the cherub attached to the Simulacrum reliquary.

I've really only scratched the surface here, and I plan on doing a follow-up about building my warlord Canoness for whom I have some interesting plans, but that's about all the time I have for now. Hopefully it'll be of some help to anyone just starting out on plastic Sisters.

PS: Paint that bloody reliquary on the Simulcarum Sister in the first picture before you assemble it. Trust me on this.

* If you don't know why, consider this exchange: "So these Sisters ignore AP -2 or lower." "Oh that's OK, my entire army is AP -3."

** Because of the short red hair, she's nicknamed 'Sister Bees' after an old friend of mine, @VoiceOfKosh

***I'm beginning to think I should try to get some sort of affiliate link for that kit, but seriously, it's really useful!