Witch King Helm WIP + intro!

Hey everyone, this will also be my intro thread. I have lurked here long enough. I'm from hermosa beach.



I have been working on doing a Lord of the rings witch king helm. I started doing it because I cant seem to sit still, and wanted to try my hand at prop making. I have a history in making some leather armor, but nothing like this.



The genesis of this whole project was finding out about halo armor, loving what people have done, then finding various forums, this forum, learned about pepakura, and started collecting cool 3d stuff to make. ordered some card stock, printed out some fun stuff. Did a small gladiator helm and trashed it eventually... it was just paper, and just to see how i liked working with it.



Then I did a witch king helm, but didnt like it as much as other projects I had seen people do. I ended up using that as just a template of sorts, and did my own version out of cardboard.

I find cardboard very easy to work with because if you mess up, it is REALLY easy to fix, add on too, etc. I used packing tape first... bad call. Use staples instead. I ended up having to take all of the tape back off because when i went to coat with resin, it would not have soaked into the cardboard.



Here's a pic of it after resin.



My next step was to mix up some bondo and coat it as smoothly as possible. After some some sanding, i had this. Btw, invest in a hand sander. I thankfully had one from before. They are invaluable.




After several sanding/bondoing sessions, I got to super bowl sunday. People loved it.



But alas it was not done.



It needed a crown. here's how I solved that problem. These are simple wooden dowels I grinded down from a dowel. Id grind it to a point, and then skill saw it off... rinse/repeat till I have all my spikes. I used one diameter for the main spike, a smaller one for the "offshoot" spike. These look like antlers/horns too me, so I tried for that look. The wood is just wood glued together.






You can see in the pic above I have also added in some ridges on the cheek and the "wing" off the side. (I also took some dramatic licensing and recessed the "wing". I like it that way.) I hope the witch king or forum members dont flame or flail me.



So then i dabbed bondo onto the helm, and pushed the horns in to bond it. I used my fingers to smooth the "root" of the horns. I dremelled later to make it uniform and nice.



Another angle while the horns are setting:




And here's how she is now, after a coat of primer, and a coat of flat black.





I'm deciding how to distress this. I havent done anything quite like this before. I know I'll likely end up doing some sort of dry brushing.. but if anyone would like to point me to a tutorial or another WIP thread where I can learn how to make this look great, please do



I may be CNC'ing a flail later too. My buddy is looking at doing a 3d model



So yeah, nice to meet everyone.

crap, this is more costume than prop, isnt it? wrong section?

nah... helmet = prop in my book :thumbsup

Great work - for weathering just do dry brushing as you said - just do it a very little at a time. I would use a couple different metallic colors - silver, some copper, a little gold, and maybe even a hint of metallic purple in some spots. The weathering is what will really complete this.

Welcome to the RPF!

Nice job so far!

Here's my old WIP thread using a very similar method, you can see how I weathered mine:

http://www.therpf.com/f9/lotr-witch-king-war-helmet-scratch-wip-80496/

Al, one of the things I didnt have time to do was go and find all the threads I found when figuring out how to do this, and yours was one of them. It came out great. I'm glad you gave me the thread again so i can check out your weathering.

Thanks so much for the tips!

This came out really great. After you do your silver metal dry bushing I use chalk pastels to weather stuff like this. Just rub thepastls onsandpaper to make a pigment est and brush and powderon. Hit it with some dullcote or saler whenyour done.

nice. I do the same kind of buildup technique alot myself. I can take over the world with a little cardboard, masking tape, resin and bondo... :lol

What we do in cardboard and bondo echoes in eternity.

LOVE!!! love:love It's looking so good. I'm very excited to see this progress along.

I just realized I havent kept this updated nearly as much as my facebook

I did the painting on it. Decided to not weather it as much as some.. but may add more later. The state it is in now looks rather undamaged compared to some of the versions I have seen. Perhaps this iteration is earlier in the witch kings career as evil warlord.

I used a flat black base to start with, and then mixed several layers of dark grey. I acheived this my mixing white into the black off to the side of the main glob of black.. to slowly get many different layers of dark grey grey. i dry brushed this over the recessed areas so that highlights would emerge while leaving recessed areas blackened. Then I continued the same process while mixing in small amounts of metallic silver paint.. this gives it the iron tone.

More and more metallic as I got into the higher layers of paint, till i was on the very edges of the mask, in the higest spots, which were full metallic highlights. I put these on very dry.





The current project progression is to mount a regular helmet "head cage" inside, so thaqt the helm can sit confortably on the wearers head. i will be using an adjustable setup so that it doesnt matter how much hair I have at the time... but really, to make sure that the eyes are at the right level. This could be very uncomfortable if not done right, and I defintely would rather not wear it at all instead of do it wrong.

Very cool!!!! Nice job!! And the weathering turned out fantastic!!!

Very nice! Great work.

Thanks for the compliments guys... I was asked to take some more on facebook, so i will post them here too.

I thought different angles might help another noob like me figure out how he wants to do his mask the same way all the other threads helped me make mine!

For anyone that was at faire in Irwindale the last few weekends... you may have seen me stumbling around being loud I put a few pics att he bottom. One of my other hobbies is making armor... you can see some of it in the pics below.





























Sorry that these girls are blocking some of my armor.

so why didn't you go as a witch king? :cool
also, your helmet turned out a lot better than mine, seeing as I was pressed for time. I ran into a HUGE problem with getting the spikes to stay on, ended up having to screw them in after trying hot glue, bondo, contact cement, etc.

I used bondo ON bondo. Bondo will adhere to other bondo pretty fricken solidly.. but this is something I know only from building a kit car ferrari. I did a glob of it, and smashed the glob with the wooden spike. I then used my fingers to wipe the bondo around, and spread it out smoothly.

Maybe next year I'll be the witch king for the second, cooler half of the day. I'm 6 foot 5, and if I can find some platforms of some sort, I should be around 8 foot at the tip of the spike