Full disclosure - these two brown pieces on the torso were the last two body parts I worked on. I rushed through them, and didn’t let them fully dry If you look real close you can see some fingerprints and discoloration:
I’m not going to worry about it, since it will largely be hidden by the rest of the torso (and the arms)
Upper Torso
As I mentioned before, my plan was to paint the midsection of the Leo brown. I have only one photo of this, and before you ask, no, the paint is not finished drying in the picture:
And before you ask again, no, I don’t normally put wet pieces onto a half-assembled model. I got a little careless this time. In fact, I ended up adding a few more coats of paint to smooth it out and make it look better.
Let’s move on to the upper upper torso. The Leo’s torso is a rarity among High Grades, in that it is not hollow:
I wonder if this has anything to do with the many (many!) complaints I see from builders regarding hollow parts on High Grades. It’s never been something that bothers me personally, but I’ve seen enough griping about it online that I have to assume someone at Bandai is aware of it (unless said griping is exclusive to western builders, in which case I doubt they’d care).
Looking at the front of the chest, we see the one (and only one) instance of a particular shade of pea green paint. This is the one and only trace of my initial attempt to add a bit of a green tint to my khaki colored paint. Apparently a little bit of green goes a long way, far longer than I estimated. I ended up painting over it with straight khaki, with the exception of this one place, where I thought (and still think) it looked good.
Arms
Both the Leo and the Tallgeese have big, ball-shaped shoulders, but they are much more noticeable on the Leo due to the shape of its armor. This is why I originally wanted to recolor them - they’re kind of hard not to notice, so they ought to look interesting.
The actual shoulder armor attaches to two points on the ball. Once secured, they can easily move up and down:
The rest of the arm is assembled in much the same fashion as the legs, complete with the removable hinge joint:
Fun fact - I lost one of the sockets that goes inside the wrist, but I was able to replace it with a polycap from an older kit. It’s a bit of a tight fit, and the hand doesn’t move quite as smoothly, but at least it worked!
Head
So far, I haven’t had any major complaints about how this kit - until now.
Sadly, the head falls victim to Bandai’s cost cutting measures, and while the problem is relatively easy to fix, it would have been just as easy to prevent it from happening in the first place.
The problem in question has to do with the Leo’s “face”. It is a simple piece of clear yellow plastic that inserts into a piece of green plastic. Out of the box, there is nothing to help make it shine or “glow”.
The fix is to cut a small square out of an old sheet of foil decals. If you don’t have any foil decals lying around, you might even be able to get away with a small piece of aluminum foil:
Once you cut it out, you simply stick it behind the clear yellow piece, and the problem is solved.
I guess Bandai didn’t want to print out a decal sheet for a single decal, but they do this all the time for the face decals on Gundams and Zakus. It is extremely annoying that you have to DIY it on the Leo.
As you can see in the photo above, I painted the red side panels khaki. It took me a long time to decide on a color. In the end, I’m a bit frustrated at how sloppy a job I did with it.
Keep in mind that I stripped and repainted these panels twice because of how bad they looked. This ended up being the best I could manage. The red plastic very easily peaked through the paint, and I guess I got a little heavy handed trying to cover it up.
Consider this Exhibit #1,0000 as to why I really need to get around to buying an airbrush one day.
Finished!
Well, not entirely finished, but the Leo itself is. Here’s a quick peak:
Now I just have to wrap up the weapons, and this kit will be ready to go.