"Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?" - Sisters of Battle Canoness conversion

Well, this is a first for me- I'd never been asked to swap a model's gender before.

My client wanted me to convert Garviel Loken into a Sisters of Battle* Canoness, which I took as a challenge to make something distinctly Sisters of Battle without losing Loken's original form, since it would be a shame to waste such a nice model as an armature.

*Yeah, yeah, I know GW has decided to up the fake latin... it'll probably take a few more years for me to get used to that.

I started by carving away a lot of Loken's chest, since the upper body bulk looked too masculine, though I left the high collar since it had a nice medieval/religious sensibility. This got a pretty good Jeanne d'Arc breastplate without the "boob armor" that's so impractical and common in sci-fi/fantasy settings. I added the fleur de lis to give the plain surface some interest, which nicely tied to both France and the Sisters of Battle.

I then lowered the shoulders a bit and replaced Loken's shoulders with those from a Retributor, and used her head with a longer neck- the combination was to move away from the top-heavy "body builder" look of Marine armor. The pistol stayed, since the Horus Heresy bolt pistols have similar proportions to SoB ones, and that one was already in scale. She got a Warriors of Chaos axe for her power axe.

For details, I sculpted the ends of the cloak to attach in skull seals, since I thought the tubes regular Sisters have would look weird with the wide collar; the axe got the power weapon node and a little wing design on the pick side; she got sleeves to make her arms look a little smaller (and to mirror regular Sisters) and a little cloth under the butt armor to match, and to avoid the overly square leg form of marines.