Tuesday, 27 January 2015

The hunt for female Guardsmen continues...

One of my perennial bugbears is the lack of female models in the Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum range. There are all-female and mixed gender regiments in the background and there always have been. A general lack of sexism is one of the Imperium's vanishingly small number of positive qualities, at least when it comes to conscripting vast quantities of cannon fodder to die for the glory of the Emperor.

Sadly, representing this on the tabletop is difficult. I've always had female characters in my background: my Traitor Guard have the Khornate assassin Scrapper Turan and her arch-rival the sorceress Hyria Bek; one of my loyalist Guard armies had a female commander, Colonel Maria Dione; and in Fantasy my Vampire Counts are led by the Master Necromancer Berenice Von Gallenberg. Representing these characters, however, has been a bugger. Berenice is a plastic Chaos Sorcerer with a plague doctor's mask; Maria has a gas mask and Scrapper was an Escher Juve even though she's long since grown to adulthood.

I'd love to do a mixed or all-female Guard regiment and I'm convinced all I need is heads: Cadian-style flak armour should all but eliminate the profile of breasts. Luckily, a friend showed me these:
These are made by Statuesque Miniatures, £4.75 for a set of ten and they're even a British company so I don't have to bother with all that currency conversion and international shipping bollocks some third parties make you go through (which is fair and can't be helped but it is annoying).
Now, since the “third party” barrier has been breached I'm wondering if I want to make these straight-up female Cadians or splash out and get some kilted legs from Victoria Lamb miniatures and do female Drookian Fen Guard or Kaledon Hunters regiment.

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