Saint Celestine

Ah, Saint Celestine. The original WTFOP special character.

She's fallen far in the modern version but is still quite worth her points, and has some great fiction and design concepts behind her. Much like the rest of the sisters model line, I feel she's aged considerably and I tend to prefer individuality for my armies, so I decided to convert her. But where to start?

I don't necessarily want her to 'match' my army. I get why people might want her to, but she's not really part of the army, right? She's allowed to stand out. Looking at the saints, there are several of them and I don't need to be stuck to celestine herself, so I decided to go with something a bit more heavenly and a bit more baroque. To strip away much of the grimdark feel and focus instead on uplifting and dramatic.

I am nowhere near done with her, but what I have so far gives a gyst of her design at least. I unfortunately don't the step by step pictures because I rushed ahead a week or so ago, but I can generally explain.

Wings. My daughter threw away a bunch of old toys a few weeks ago, when I first started dreaming up this army, and while taking out the trash to the dumpster I saw a bunch of her toys laying on the ground because she doesn't actually pay attention to... anything. Laying amongst the rubble that I was scooping into the trashcan, I find the perfect set of wings! (Do not judge me. Much.) Originally off a barbie sized doll from the ever after high line, one of the two versions of Cupid's daughter. So those got yoinked. I was suspicious they might be about the right size for a space marine... and was wrong. But they WERE about the right size for the much larger Scibor truescale praetorians, of which I have a couple. These models have been discontinued (and with good reason), but I figured I could do a quick bangup conversion.

As you can see, the scibor mini is a bit fragile. Its weapon/arms mount to the torso in a rather flimsy way and only go together in one way. Once built they look great but they're hardly the greatest model around. This particular one broke at the wrists almost immediately after being built, before I even got to painting. That led to me mounting some magnets in the wrists and hands, filing and brownstuffing new wrist segments, and then after I found the wings I scooped the helmeted head off the model, mounted magnets on the back and the wings, and magnetized a statuesque miniatures head (this was probablya mistake, as it gets lost all the time even in current sitting still mode. So I will be gluing once painted.)

The head is slightly on the small side, but I kind of dig that look. The wings could be bigger but are comparable to the winged figures from gw in ratio. The weapon should clean up okay with a bit of careful greenstuffing over the brownstuff and should look right as rain with paint. I am overall relatively pleased.

I still want to mount it on a suitably large and dynamic base, and I am considering cutting the feet and extending the robes to make her fly but that would make it a much more intensive conversion, and this was meant for its ease.

Obviously still a work in progress but hopefully not terrible.

P.S. please ignore the food stains on the cutting board, somebody got confused last night and decided it was meant for food (eww).