BLADE and BRUSH
Active Member
This is my rendition of the lovely Bandai AT-AT kit. At some point I do intend to make a snow base for it, but my attempts so far have been less than stellar.
I took another gamble and weathered it with oil paints and mineral turpentine. Fortunately I managed to avoid any issues, but that could be because I took the precaution of removing most of the snap-fit pegs and gluing much of the kit together.
You might notice what looks a bit like snow in the images above and below. I tried using a product called Jo Sonja's Texture Paste. I've had decent results in the past, but it seems to be shrinking and drying more translucently than it used to, making it difficult to use.
This is an excellent kit, but one area I wanted to improve on was the feet. It was a tedious job, but I chose to scribe all the panel lines to more accurately reflect the look of the studio models. Since the lower panels are raised on the kit, I had to sand them flush with the upper part of the foot as well as scribing the lines. I also drilled those 3 holes in each ankle. That ended up being harder than it needed to be as I had to fill and re-drill a few that where off-center.
The other thing I really wanted to remedy was the detail on the top of the AT-AT (indicated by the red arrow on the right). It sits way too high on Bandai's kit compared to the references I've seen so I carefully cut it off with a hobby saw and re-attached it. The other arrow pointing to the neck section is because of a fairly obvious part separation line that I had to hide. I applied a liberal amount of glue and pushed the parts together so that soft plastic oozed from the join. I then restored the lines with careful sanding and re-scribing.
Here is a link to the imgur album if you want to zoom in even further on any of these pictures.
https://imgur.com/a/PPIxpD1
