The Sisters and the Forbidden Smoothie

So, I wanted to get a post like this written a week ago, but Canada Post decided that wasn’t going to happen, so here we are. The good news is that I can now post a real, tangible update to my Battle Sisters project (followers from the 40k world, rejoice)!

This post was brought to you by Tista Minis, a friendly not-so-local game and hobby shop located in Canada. This isn’t a real sponsorship, but I did literally buy all the things you’re going to see from them, cutting the usual shipping time by about seventy-five percent. If it weren’t for them you’d probably be reading this post in April, so I’m grateful enough towards them to give a free shout-out.

Anyway, we’re basically all set; I just got my pot of Abaddon Black out of the mail, we’re gonna start by taking one lucky Sister and applying a thin undercoat-

…

Oh, God damn it.

Unfortunately, not only does hobbying in Canada come with the downside of having to endure long shipping times, it also has the downside of having absolutely batshit weather for half of the year. This pot of paint is frozen from sitting in a mailbox outside at -20C for over seven hours. There really isn’t much I can do except wait for it to thaw. Maybe the condensation will thin it out a little, too.

I shared this with a few friends, much to their amusement:

For the record: you have my permission to post my pot of Abaddon Black to /r/forbiddensnacks for free karma.

But this is fine, really; paint wasn’t the only thing I got from Tista. We’ve got a few more Sisters waiting to be inducted into the ranks of the Mourning Veil:

More plastic!

I’ve chosen to buy a Canoness because my army is in great need of someone to lead them, as well as a Seraphim squad because jump packs. I’m a very simple man.

I’ve also got some Tamiya cement and dice– actually, is it just me, or does anyone else think dice are really aesthetically pleasing?

Look at those sharp edges and round corners.

…Yeah, this is weird. I’m sorry. Let’s just build a Canoness.

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Step one.

I took plenty of photos this time around; my idea was to talk about things while you get to watch this girl come together. That was before I set this article down for like four days and forgot everything I was going to say, so bear with me.

I’ve come to recognize that cleaning up models and scraping up mould lines is my least favourite part of the assembly process. I don’t know– it’s just tedious work. Here’s a neat thing I noticed about it, though: don’t hold your hobby knife perpendicular to the model’s surface. It’ll be more likely to skip around and create a jagged texture. You have to keep it at an angle where possible.

I write in captions because the CSS for this site doesn’t put enough padding between image and text without them. It actually really bothers me.

I’m all about gluing things together, though. The Tamiya cement works pretty nicely, definitely glad that I picked that up over using the Citadel glue-tube again. The brush gives you a lot more control over where the glue actually goes, as well as the amount of glue that goes onto the model. (You can do this to some degree with Citadel glue, but the excess just finds its way into a paper towel or something and goes to waste.)

I’ve actually learned that you can put too little cement on a piece, I don’t know if it’s capillary action or surface tension or whatever, but if you put on too little the cement will just kind of pool together and not cover the areas it needs to. Not the biggest discovery in the world, but hey, the more you know.

The lack of boob plate displeases Slaanesh.

The mantle and chestplate here just kind of snap together and hold without any glue. That means less work for me to do.

There’s actually a thicker variant of the chestplate included that includes a rosarius*– or at least a rosarius as it appears in my understanding of Sisters fluff, which is a big thick “I” that’s mounted roughly around the collar area and protects you from things. I don’t know if they come in different shapes or sizes, but the Codex says she’ll have one regardless of how you assemble her, so we’ll just call this a Rosarius Lite(tm) or something. I don’t know; I picked it because I liked it better.

*Future Node here: I had to actually look this up because it was bothering me. The short version is that I’m dumb and stupid and what I was talking about in the paragraph above isn’t a rosarius at all. You may disregard everything I’ve just said– I blame the Codex.

There’s a “Real Slim Shady” joke you could say here. I’ll let you imagine it.

I just realized: if I’m going to paint this Canoness in Mourner colours, this model is going to be blue as all hell. I don’t know if that’ll be a good thing, but we’ll figure it out I guess.

Speaking of Mourners– this girl is probably going to be leading this army, so she needs a name. Unfortunately Lucretia’s place in Mourner history is in M38, so there’s really no feasible way to have her exist in the 42nd millennium unless I want to participate in Draigo-level Warp fuckery, which I don’t. I mean, I could probably write it and it’d work, but I don’t want to.

Zaria is a cool name, and it fits with the Order’s solar themes. Let’s go with that.

Blessed blade and a condemnor boltgun, because those are cool.

I hate putting arms on a model. You have to dry fit them and make sure they fit relatively snugly so that the glue can cure properly, or else they’ll just slide around and potentially ruin themselves. And even if you get them in the correct orientation they take longer to set initially, so you’ll be holding them together for slightly longer than usual. God forbid that I encounter models that hold weapons with two arms– it’s a wonder that I haven’t mangled a Sister or two yet.

These arms are an exception, though. Zaria’s arms are the best arms.

Here she is!

So that’s Zaria, assembled and ready for a coat of paint. Speaking of paint: it’s mostly thawed at this point, so we’ll finally see a painting article on this blog in the very near future. I have another post for the Seraphim kit planned as well, so look forward to that.

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you next time!