RowBoatCop
Active Member
Hi guys, I got some great feedback about painting this thing last week which helped me get over the line in time for this past weekends festivities, so I just thought I'd post a few pics of the process. This is my first time attempting any serious prop building, so it's nowhere near the standard of the usual stuff on here but as a Halloween costume I think it worked out ok!
My main materials were a kids motocross helmet, some plastic placemats from ikea & a few plastic clipboards. I wanted to do the construction in plastic so that assuming I got the lines right I'd be able to prime & paint without having to use bondo/filler, which I have zero experience with.
As I was doing this freehand from reference photos I has some trouble figuring out the curve on the visor, in the end I ended up building a sub structure for the lighter plastic visor top to sit on using the heavier clipboard plastic.
After much trial & error I got the upper visor looking close to what I wanted, then it was on to the lower portion, I had to cut away more of the helmet "jaw" as I went along as it made the mouth part look far too out of proportion!
Eventually got the basic shape down.
Next I trimmed the sides of the visor & started figuring out the shapes that made up the temple areas. I also got an a2 sheet of 2mm thick acetate from an art shop to use for the visor, I has originally planned to tint it using the fabric dye method, but I found no matter what I did (temperature/ amount of dye) it curled up and didn't take the tint at all. I ended up using a plastic document folder as a tint, horribly cloudy but I was short on time. Also here I was messing with the ear pucks, I ended up not using the lights, but I may add them in some form in future.
I then finished off the temple area, ended up using a couple of hair gel lids for the ears, along with some weird plastic things I found at the DIY shop, also I filled in the holes left from where the motocross visor attached with thumb tack tops & hot glue ( clearly I'm very anti filler!)
Finished the construction & gave it some primer, then gloss black, this was less than 24 hours before I had to have it ready for a part so I was under pressure!
I forgot to take a proper picture of my led rig, I borrowed an idea from I believe Chaz over at the daft club, basically stripping the led board out of a programmable scrolling message thing meant for a car rear window, making a bracket to hold it in a curve and praying it doesn't snap in two. Swapping out the car connection with a 9v battery was handy enough even for me.
And the finished product! The thing I don't like is due to the helmet not being a great size overall it's a little too big, but I tried to make the proportions look right at least. Thanks to those who gave me advice last week, and thanks rpf, never would have thought I could put something like this together if I hadn't been lurking on here seeing just what was possible when you put your mind to something!
My main materials were a kids motocross helmet, some plastic placemats from ikea & a few plastic clipboards. I wanted to do the construction in plastic so that assuming I got the lines right I'd be able to prime & paint without having to use bondo/filler, which I have zero experience with.
As I was doing this freehand from reference photos I has some trouble figuring out the curve on the visor, in the end I ended up building a sub structure for the lighter plastic visor top to sit on using the heavier clipboard plastic.
After much trial & error I got the upper visor looking close to what I wanted, then it was on to the lower portion, I had to cut away more of the helmet "jaw" as I went along as it made the mouth part look far too out of proportion!
Eventually got the basic shape down.
Next I trimmed the sides of the visor & started figuring out the shapes that made up the temple areas. I also got an a2 sheet of 2mm thick acetate from an art shop to use for the visor, I has originally planned to tint it using the fabric dye method, but I found no matter what I did (temperature/ amount of dye) it curled up and didn't take the tint at all. I ended up using a plastic document folder as a tint, horribly cloudy but I was short on time. Also here I was messing with the ear pucks, I ended up not using the lights, but I may add them in some form in future.
I then finished off the temple area, ended up using a couple of hair gel lids for the ears, along with some weird plastic things I found at the DIY shop, also I filled in the holes left from where the motocross visor attached with thumb tack tops & hot glue ( clearly I'm very anti filler!)
Finished the construction & gave it some primer, then gloss black, this was less than 24 hours before I had to have it ready for a part so I was under pressure!
I forgot to take a proper picture of my led rig, I borrowed an idea from I believe Chaz over at the daft club, basically stripping the led board out of a programmable scrolling message thing meant for a car rear window, making a bracket to hold it in a curve and praying it doesn't snap in two. Swapping out the car connection with a 9v battery was handy enough even for me.
And the finished product! The thing I don't like is due to the helmet not being a great size overall it's a little too big, but I tried to make the proportions look right at least. Thanks to those who gave me advice last week, and thanks rpf, never would have thought I could put something like this together if I hadn't been lurking on here seeing just what was possible when you put your mind to something!
