my repaints/mods to Galaxy's Edge X-Wing helmets (with tutorial)

Welding on a new mohawk strip.

If you do no other modification for your repaint, do this. You don't even have to take it apart (except maybe the front cap), and it makes a world of difference in an accurate look.

As noted previously, the built-in one is recessed, while the ones on screen had one sitting on top. (It was there simply to hide the seam of the two vacuformed halves stuck together.) Keep the original, though, because it helps keep the helmet together, and is a surface to weld upon.

Start from the front and do a bit at a time.

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At the back, a little touch of flame softens up the plastic to enable the strip to be bent with a nice curve.

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Weld & trim.

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Strip attached!

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First coat: I hoped to skip priming the whole thing, and sprayed semi-gloss white. Some of the original paint/screenprinting ink still on the helmet did not react well.
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A couple more rounds of sanding and priming,

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then a top coat of semi-gloss white. I think this pic is just the white primer though.

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Decals!
I couldn't find a "Rebel symbol" online that matched the ANH helmets. So I took a Porkins framegrab into Photoshop and did my best to warp it back to normal, given it was at angle to camera and on a curved surface. Then I drew over that image. To my eye it is not symmetrical, so mine isn't either.

For red/yellow stripes, I taped a piece of paper onto the helmet and roughly drew them on, scanned that piece of paper, and used that to draw over in Photoshop. Several printouts/adjustments/redos follow. I didn't bother tidying up portions that would be covered by the "rebel symbol".

Making the "cat eye" emblem involved the same process. I made two versions, with different amounts of.... eyelashes?.... and variance to the grey blobs, since I think those were hand-painted directly on the helmet.

Making the black/yellow and blue/gray stripes was comparatively simple, although again with a couple trials and adjustments.

Three other symbols were downloaded from partsofsw.com (although I had provided one of them in the first place ;) ).

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Red and yellow dots are commercial stickers:
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The others I printed onto vinyl sticker paper:
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I did two Porkins, the extra for a friend who helped me get the helmets at a good price.
The third became the "generic" white helmet at the beginning of the thread, and the fourth will be a Luke blastshield.
More to follow after that!

edit: the fourth ended up being used for the John D. helmet.
 
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Masked off and painted the area around the ram's horns. See post #5 in this thread for why I chose green instead of the black most folks do.
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For smaller pieces the decals worked fine. But for bigger ones....
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I eventually figured out how to get the rebel symbol down without wrinkling. The white interior portions need to be partially cut out, a little over halfway, and allowed to be overlapped by the black border as you work your way around during application. But that's only part of the problem here. The big red area just won't go down without wrinkles. Or without cutting it in sections, and if that were done, the seams would show.

So there was nothing to do but mask and paint. Having made the graphic did help, though, as I was able to use it as a guide.
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Red, then remask for the rectangles, hit it with more white, then yellow. Masking for all those little rectangles is laborious. One loses track of what are positive and negative areas. That resulted in some redos, and only very recently I noticed I still have one too few or two many in a couple places.

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The black drop shadows around the yellow rectangles were done by hand with a paint pen.
 
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The first pass of weathering, a misting of flat black. There was also dabbing on watercolor to get in the crevasses, and smearing on soot from my fireplace with my bare hands. And stages of partial removal and light sanding of each of those passes. Finish off with a spray of satin clear.
Final result in first post.
 

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I could not find any yellow foam for screen-accurate padding. I seem to recall old yellow foam was made out of material since deemed dangerous, and I guess they don't use the color anymore to differentiate the safe stuff from it. (I wonder how RS does it.) Anyway, I just spray painted white foam yellow.

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However, the plastic insert covering the visor when in retracted position takes up too much room, so if you wear it with the padding, it sits way too high on your head. What I plan to do (and haven't yet) is to cut that part down, just past the first spot where it's screwed down, at the red line shown here. I think that will free up the needed space.

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Did up another. Red 4 John D.!
 

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Working on a new one, a former Black Series Wedge is becoming a Luke Blast Shield.
Here are the button covers (as IDed by lonepigeon) that are the black knobs featured on this helmet. They come as two interlocking halves, the cap snapping onto a smaller piece with mounting tabs. I decided to use my own mounting method, though, by epoxying screws into the caps. I can attach them with nuts inside the helmet, and thus no danger of making a mess with glue or them getting knocked off.

link to the parts on the Digikey site:
 

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Fantastic. I bought a couple Trapper Wolf Black Series from Ollie's when they were on sale and am hoping to repaint them. This and few other threads have been invaluable. Thanks for posting in-progress photos and details.
 

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