And now for the exterior painting and assembly.
The main thing that grabbed my attention on the walker in Empire Strikes Back was that there was a little red helmet logo on the side, like from a particular squad or other group. I wanted to use that to indicate this may be a part of the same unit as the one we see. That model was made from spare parts and evolved into the AT-ST we see in Return of the Jedi.

Here is a crappy comparison I made. They’re not really to scale, though I tried to make them the same height in the image.
Return of the Jedi version on the left, Empire on the right.Notice that the legs match pretty well, but the head area is much larger on the Return of the Jedi unit. All the designs are there, but the proportions are different to work with the shooting needs of RotJ, and to account for pilots. It seems that anyone in the ESB walker would be pretty cramped unless it was actually much larger than the RotJ version.

Here are the pics I took during the building and painting process. Not too many were taken as stopping to take pictures just breaks the groove.

This is the base color put down. I do like how the button in the back blends in.

Those drumsticks just don’t have any meat at all on them.

 

I tried to make a stencil using masking tape and a scalpel, didn’t work so great, but looking at the original walker, that one looks pretty dodgy too.
Since red is so hard to paint over and look okay, I just left it rough. To me, it looks like a trooper painted it on by hand when the CO wasn’t looking.