Do the Sisters of Battle, the most devoted worshippers of the Emperor in all of the Imperium, ever fall to the corruption of Chaos? It seems likely. If there’s one lesson that can be learnt from the world of Warhammer 40k and The Horus Heresy, it’s that human beings are pretty darn fallible. But Games Workshop has never produced minis showing corrupted Adepta Sororitas, and barely touched on the concept in lore.
Enter Chilean artist Kabewski, who has designed a lovely-looking Sisters of Battle model for each of the Chaos gods. Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh are all present and correct; no one’s left out. While these stunning models may look every bit like a physical model, Kabewski actually excels in the art of digital kitbashing, or ‘digibashing’, chopping and changing images of different miniatures together through image editing apps to create something entirely new.
“I create these image ideas because I don’t have the means nor time to make them myself, so I share them with others so they don’t go to waste,” Kabewski tells Wargamer. “Generally I’ve noticed that Chaos Sisters of Battle have been a very popular idea,” they say. But while Kabewski has spotted Chaos Sisters in fan art time and time again, they’ve encountered very few conversion or kitbash attempts.
“I thought that making an example of how to approach the idea for each god would inspire people to try it themselves, with the aid of pre-existing images to give them more focus and direction in the conversion process.”
For this project, Kabewski used a range of different minis from across the Warhammer-verse, including dipping into Age of Sigmar which, handily, has plenty of mortal chaos follower models to play around with. “I wanted to keep each sister true to their respective god but with a degree of restraint in the chaos bits used,” they say. “I didn’t want them to seem overly busy and complex, just enough to separate them from their true loyalist form, but not so much that you wouldn’t be able to tell what they were to begin with.”
While the creator says time constraints are one of the main reasons they often opt for digital kitbashes over physical, producing digibash artwork in this manner also clearly takes a great deal of time and craftsmanship. “Some can take from half an hour to an hour, or several hours of trial and error,” Kabewski says, “depending on how much I need to edit the parts, separate them, blend and correct issues, colour shift and even manually highlight and paint over the image.”
“Many attempts get discarded all together because the parts wont mesh well together or I don’t have enough image material to work with,” they add.
Kabewski’s been in the Warhammer 40k hobby for four years, and has slowly built up a collection of armies and kill teams, all the while producing and sharing digital concept art of their ideas. These have included a new line of Kroot troops, a comically egg-shaped take on Space Marine power armour, and many blendings of 40k and Age of Sigmar armies .
Kabewski says: “Many people have told me they get briefly fooled when they see my hobby ideas, thinking they are actually a real preview at first glance.” While they say that might disappoint people sometimes, it’s that level of enthusiasm and excitement that Kabewski is looking to harness. “When you wish it was real, you have more incentive to make it real yourself,” they explain.