HGUC Zaku WIP
The Zaku is, generally speaking, my favorite design from Gundam. However, this also means I tend to be pretty picky about how they should look.
The situation with the Zaku is a bit odd in that its look has never been entirely consistent. The original animation, the lineart, the Zaku kits that came out in the 1980s... None of them really match each other. The animation itself, additionally, is so error-laden that it is challenging to use it as a basis for how a Zaku "should" look. So to some extent it's all open to interpretation.
In this case, I always felt like the legs looked too "bloated" but until now I hadn't worked out a satisfactory plan for fixing them. One of the big problems was simply knowing what to change. With no clear-cut target, it was sort of a puzzle with no clear solution.
Basically, the legs looked "bloated" because there was bulk but not enough emphasis on curvature to break up the space. It seemed that there were three ways to approach the problem: shorten the legs, add putty to bulk up the curvature, or change something about the parts surrounding the lower leg to make the part look more suitable in context.
I found some inspiration in some of the old kits as well as the various minor appearances of the Zaku in anime following the original Gundam series: basically, I saw versions of the Zaku there which were both good-looking and, apparently, not too far off from the look of the HGUC. So I did some photo-edit experimentation in GIMP to see if I could come up with a reasonably simple set of steps to give the kit a better look... So far I'm very pleased with the results. In my mind this has turned a kit that I had started to really hate into something with real potential.