A Fist Full of Bitz: Ponytails!?

I have seen all manner of female guard conversions, ideas, guides and templates on the web but none of them really appealed to me. Typically you end up with the normal gamer solution of tank tops, bikini tops or flowing hair and tight leather. None of these were what I was going for, so I went in a bit different direction. I wanted to add a female sniper to my veteran squad, but not like your stereotypical swinging from a pole female, a very subtle conversion that you would probably miss on first glance. Here is the where I started, held together with blue-tac:

The strap going from the back of the gun up to the arm is from the cadain command sprue off the guy with the wounded arm, its a simple dummy cord to keep the weapon from falling off your body... I went with a kneeling down / waving the squad forward to make her look like a forward scout and add some dynamic posing to the squad. Also helps with me being lazy because in this pose it is more difficult to notice things like length of legs and size of hips that always make female guard conversions look weird, because they put man legs on female torso! (Remember: 50% of a good conversion is picking the right pieces to compliment and hide your level of ability.)

The torso started out as a female eldar guardian, mostly because a friend of mine said it wouldn't work and I wanted to see if I could pull it off. I green stuffed the standard cadian style flak armour over the normal eldar style 'six-pack muscle' armour. I cut the torso in half (from top to bottom, leaving only the front of the chest) and glued it to the back of Cadain torso I had also cut in half. Once glued together I shaved and filed the sides of the stomach to give her a more shapely (and feminine) appearance.

Also (not pictured) the arms took alot of work, but actually the eldar / cadain hybrid torso forced me to trim the arms so it would fit, much work had to be done in shaving down the upper arms to fit the torso (making the point where you glue the arm on much thinner), even shaving off about 2-3mm of the upper arm so the arms are shorter and match the decreased torso size...

For the legs I took a black sharpie and put a ton of ink on the bottom of the torso and then quickly positioned it onto the legs so that I got an outline of where to trim the legs to there was a smooth transition between torso and legs.

It is difficult to see all the work that went into it, but I knew that going into it - the objective was a subtle female sniper that you would miss at first glance. Very subtly done is the head, the side 'ear protectors' were shaved off, the entire head was sanded down by about 2 mm and the 'ear protectors' were reattached. This gives you the smaller head profile of a female soldier, in my opinion this is where many people simply put a male head on and don't think to alter the size.

While this is still very much a painting WIP, the main components and construction of the mini is complete. I tried to get a good side shot that would show the armour and how the breasts were done, but unless you have the mini in your hand and can really rotate it around and look at different angles - its difficult to see.

some of the gear on the back, I think this backpack is from the men-at-arms kit. I had to shave it down significantly to get it to fit, otherwise it stuck out way to far... (the belt knife was added for fun)

and over to the right side, you can see the red pony tail coming out from back of the helmet and the profile of the chest indicating that this is a female guard soldier.

Overall I achieved what I was going for. A subtle female guard sniper that you will definitely miss on the first look, there are a few subtle signs to point it out like the slim hips and arms along with two very large signs like the pony tail and chest. For a first shot at a female guard mini I’m definitely happy with it.