Lately I've been working on this Zaku from the "Gundam" anime - the kit is the "High Grade Universal Century" version released in 2002. This particular kit is a bit of a sore spot for me, because it represented Bandai's first attempt (after years of presenting modernized, detail-enhanced versions of the Zaku in their kits) at going back to something like the look of the Zaku in the original anime... It's the first "retro" Zaku kit... And it looks nothing like the Zaku from the original TV series. So it's kind of this bland thing, not cool enough to be appealing for that reason, not retro enough to be appealing for that reason... After several years of being kind of frustrated with the kit and its existence (not to mention the follow-up kits, the MG Zaku v2.0 and so on) I decided to try fixing it.
One of my inspirations was working with the MSV kits from the early 1980s. These kits were sort of the second generation of Gundam kits after the original product line in 1980-1981. Despite the short time between the initial product line and the MSV stuff, the MSV stuff is still far superior in almost every way. The Zaku kits in the MSV line also had a look that was very different from the original 1980-1981 kits - a bulkier look that's a little more in line with the look of the HGUC... The MSV kits also have some issues - odd proportions in places, plastic-on-plastic joints everywhere, etc. - which made me appreciate the relative simplicity of working with certain parts of the HGUC. So the idea of this project was to take the HGUC and work on its strength, and try to make a reasonably simple set of alterations to turn it into something nicer-looking, along the lines of the MSV Zakus.
My early efforts on this project involved experimentation in the photo editor - taking photos of the HGUC kit and coming up with a set of photo edits (sticking to things that would be easy to do structurally with the model - lengthening and shortening parts, etc.) to improve the look of the HGUC. I felt that probably I'd want to shorten the lower legs and lengthen the upper legs - but the process of working with the photo gave me a much better idea of where the cuts should be made, how much material should be removed/inserted, and what it'd take to bridge the altered parts.
The shoulder armor and shield were also sore spots for me with this kit - Bandai has a nasty habit of making Zaku shields that are too narrow to be much use in defense - and the spiked shoulder armor had kind of a weird shape to it that I don't really like. I replaced the shield with one from the High Grade Zaku released in 1996, and the spiked shoulder armor was a resin copy of the shoulder armor that comes with the MSV "Minelayer" Zaku kit.
Apart from those changes, I also shortened the skirt armor a bit, replaced the molded "power cables" with beads-and-springs, added a lit and poseable "monoeye" camera in the head, added a set of resin hands, fixed up a few other odds and ends. Now the thing is painted:
There's paint now...
Painting's not complete, of course, and there's some things I have to fix... But I wanted to throw it together and see how it looks...