Ortho leg #5

Version 4 of my leg design looked good to me until I tried it in a composite with the rest of the Zaku body. All such composites that I do have the leg tilted, because I regard this as the Zaku’s “neutral” pose. But it’s much easier to take advantage of the graph paper when drawing the leg if the leg is aligned to the graph lines – so I designed the leg in one pose and then found it didn’t work so well in the pose I wanted it to look good in. One day at work I took one of my paper printouts of the V4 composite and altered it with whiteout and a pen in order to get the look I wanted. I was able to get a significant change in effect without a huge change to the leg: I raised all of the leg apart from the bottom edge of the ankle skirt, and I moved the inboard pod’s lower edge a little bit up and inward. These changes were the basis for version five of my Zaku leg design.

Version 5 is also the first version in which I’ve drawn the leg from front, back, and both side views. Integrating the back view was tougher than I’d expected – the two major issues were that the ankle skirt/fringe thing, which looks fine from the other views, looks like it doesn’t come down far enough in the rear view. Second is that the lower legs look too stout from behind. In front they have the center part of the lower leg breaking up that space, but in back the pod is uninterrupted, and it’s additionally compressed a bit above and below. I did some give-and-take trying to improve the look of the back of the leg, I’m pretty happy with it now.

Key features of this version of the design:

• My first rendering of the rear side of the leg.
• Closest yet to my initial front-view sketches
• Lower edges of leg pods moved upward and inward toward center of leg to accentuate the inward curve at the bottom of the pod.