INQ28: Building a female Imperial Guard Trooper

The Emperor guides my hand.

Having just completed building Paige Levkau, a pilot hired by Inquisitor Anton Soljic, I decided that I wanted to continue to bolster his field agents.  I realized other than Levkau, I did not have any other female agents and decided to change that with the next conversion!

Although I really liked the helgun that the Death Korp Grenadier came with, I wanted to try to make it look like a traditional rifle, and emulated an M14.

Although Games Workshop does not make too many female models, I found that it was not a big issue because most of the male ones can be substituted for female ones easily. After all, most of the models in 40k are so armored that one really would not be able to distinguish gender anyway; the Imperial Guard is not going to stamp out special breastplates for its female soldiers.  So the only real issue was finding some suitable female heads. I ended up finding that Andrew Rae, of Statuesque Miniatures, had a line of Heroic Scale Female Heads, and decided to give them a try.  I am pleased to say that they were a good investment.  They are nicely detailed and well cast in white metal.  I opted for the shaved heads (though, they offer others with different hairstyles and headwear). It should be mentioned that the heads will not be perfectly scaled to all 40k models (admittedly, even GW’s own models are not always scaled to one another).  They worked well for the body that I selected, however, a Death Korp Grenadier.

Like with all my other Imperial Guard operatives/Inquisition agents, I made sure that she had a host of equipment at her belt, including a trusty sidearm.

Apart from switching the model’s head, the brunt of my conversion work focused on small detail-oriented modifications. The Death Korp Grenadier’s are some of the nicest Imperial Guardsmen models produced by Games Workshop, and manage to avoid many of the stereotypical 40k design tropes (massive guns without stocks, ridiculous optics, etc.).  In fact, their helguns look fantastic, equipped with proper stocks (that are even shouldered correctly), and have small holographic sights that look as though they could be used.  Considering how nice they are, I could have easily used the rifle just as it came from Forge World, but I felt it would be cooler if it fired solid rounds rather than laser ones.  And the more I looked at the rifle, the more I saw an M14, so I decided to try to create one!  First, I extended the barrel/created a flash suppressor and front sight from a section of a Sicarian Infiltrator antenne.  I used a small sliver of plasticard and a piece of a Sicarian antenna to create the charging mechanism for the rifle.  Finally, using greenstuff I modified the magazine for the weapon, since the model originally was powered via cabling.  A knife was added to her back, similar to my previous storm troopers, along with a magazine pouch and a fragmentation grenade.  I also added a sidearm to her belt, which was based off of a holstered pistol that came from one of Wyrd’s multipart kits from Into the Breach.  I did a bunch of greenstuff work to make the pistol look more like a modern polymer automatic, rather than a single-action revolver.

The plastic scion models are simply massive, dwarfing the Death Korp Grenadier model that the sniper was base on. 

So there we have it, a rather straightforward conversion to add another lady to Inquisitor Soljic’s retinue!  I am pretty pleased with how she turned out, there really was no need for a separate female sculpt.  I am happy with her simple and pragmatic design; very akin to Soljic’s other agents.

- Adam Wier