Right now i am building a Power Ranger helmet - this one - and it's coming along great. My only question is painting it.
* What paint should I use?
* Do I paint the pieces before I glue them or after?
* How long should I let it dry before I can wear it?
I'm also curious about a cheep solution to using a tented lens for the lens part of the helmet. If anyone has any answers for that, I would be most thankful.
Ok so there are a couple of ways to do a foam helmet, some great sources for foamsmithing stuff are Evil Ted Smith and Punished Props youtube channels (links there) and they each have several videos on painting/finishing foam stuff.
Basically you want to put the entire helmet together first with hot glue/contact cement first, heat seal it with a heat gun (hotter is better, just a passover to see the foam become 'shiny'), seal it with something else and then paint. I personally seal it with brush on latex after heatsealing as it is flexible and can be tinted with acrylic/painted over with spraypaint or water based paints, but most people use either several coats of Plastidip (which is a spray-on latex in a couple of colors) or several coats simple white PVA glue or Modge Podge. You seal it because the foam is porous and it would suck up any paint you use, and these options allow you to get a potentially shiny finish on the helmet. You can paint it with normal spray paint cans (may crack due to inflexibility), brush on acrylic, use an airbrush with liquid latex or paint, or normal tin paint from a hardware shop.
The youtube channels above have a couple of videos each on the subject, hope they help you out. Would like to see the final product when you finish.
I built a foam Pink Ranger Helmet for my wifes costume a few years ago:
At the time I used a few coats of watered down PVA to seal the foam and spray paints.
A cheap option I found for the lens was to get a flexible flat peice of clear plastic (A plastic bottle etc) cut it to shape and then used a piece of black car window tint film, applied the film to the plastic then glued it in place.
Now I prefer to hand paint my foam pieces and often just use regular household paint, I used this method for a full set of Stormtrooper armor and it worked fine and I'm currently building a foam Bowcaster and have just used some Matt black paint a friend had left over from decorating his house. I rarely bother sealing with PVA now either I just go straight to painting as using regular paints is fairly cheap and so I essentially just seal with paint and it requires less coats than the PVA.
