The crest began in a similar manner to the rest of the helmet, but instead of using Bondo, I skinned the foam with sulfer-free clay. I was more comfortable making the organic shapes I needed out of clay, and I knew from experience I could take a mold from this clay with no problems. Lucky for me, a few days previously Weta had launched their new website which features spectacular close-ups of this helmet. I spent two nights sculpting the horse head before I was satisfied and it was time for silicone. In a perfect world I would have cast this solid, but I was low on resin and I knew I still had to cast the cheek guards, so I slush cast the crest and filled it with Crayola Model Magic (I was totally winging it at this point). This was 8/17, exactly 6 days until I needed it completed.
My documentation fell off a little from here on out, and I don’t have any pictures of sculpting the cheeks or ear-disks. The cheeks were a scaled-down version of the main helmet procedure, including layered contoured foam, acrylic, Bondo, masking tape details, more bondo, lots of sanding. The ears were just super-scuply, baked, sanded, molded, cast and painted. I noticed by following
Blind Squirrel‘s Theoden build that one of the details on his helmet is the same as on Éomer’s, so I used his version as a reference for sculpting mine.
The last detail that had been keeping me up at night was the knot-work trim that went all the way around the helmet, up the sides and down the cheeks. I considered 3D printing it, but I have no experience doing that and not enough time for trial and error. I considered braiding actual metal wire, which I later discovered had been used on another costumer’s version of this helmet. I considered finding fabric trim and somehow making that look like metal. BUT NO! I had an epiphany late one night, and went out to the garage to confirm that it would work. I had bought this roll of really thin aluminum from Michael’s, and I cut off a piece and drew on it with a ball-point pen. This actually did a great job of embossing the metal with my pattern, so I just traced the braid onto the thin metal and cut strips.