Scratch built battle-mech

So this week we see an example of how I turn "goofing around" into a finished product.  When I was still in school I was working on a sketch model for a building and made a thing out of a few scraps of matte board and thought to myself "that looks like a mechs' toe".  And indeed it did.  So much so that I made another one, then a foot, then a whole leg.  Then I tried to copy the leg, and make a body for the legs to hold up.  Eventually I had a cool shape and painted it grey and set it up on my desk to show off.

Later on I had more time and pulled it back out to update it.  I opened the canopy up and put windows in it and built a cockpit for the pilots.  I used the grey as a base coat and pre-shaded the panel lines before over coating it and adding mud-splatter to the legs.  I topped it off with some decals on the body and a painted Head Up Display on the canopy glass.

It's not gorgeous nor is it well build (it's prone to toppling easily) but it was a fun build and is now a neat story of how one toe became a whole mech.

Canopy removed and ready for paint

 Pre-shading done

 Not a lot of detail in the cockpit but the windows are small

 Here you can see the heat sinc and rocket pods

 Masked off and ready for the razzle-dazzle paint job

 Painted and decaled.  the canopy is near the feet

 Mud splattering on the feet.  There's that pesky toe that kicked it all off

The finished product

Here you can just see the painted head up display