Howlrunner
Sr Member
After weeks and weeks of off and on work, I've finally got this kit finished! This is the Richies Armor Y-Wing Pilot helmet kit which I've painted up and tried to make as close to the original Grey Leader helmet as I can.
This is the only WIP picture that I bothered to take - this is it after it's been sanded down, 2 spots have been filled and 2 colours of paint have been sprayed on. The kit also comes with the visor and 2 greeblies for the indentations - I've completely scrapped the greeblies as they look nothing like what should be there and made my own from found parts.
I've managed to get some great reference pictures for this - they're pretty rare and as such all of the helmets I've seen before have an incorrect vertically symmetrical paint scheme as the painter has just used the picture from the SW Chronicles of the left hand side and flipped it to do the opposite side. This incorrect symmetrical paint scheme can be seen on the new Y-Wing Pilot figure from Hasbro as well. And great reference pictures mean you can do things like this:
The original is on the left, mine is on the right.
Basically, I printed off the original image life size, scribbled over the back of it, then drew over it to leave a sort of paint-by-numbers outline on the helmet, which I then hand painted.
And here's the finished article next to the real thing - original on the top row, my copy on the bottow row:
Everything but the text was done by hand with a paintbrush and some masking tape. The lettering was done on Photoshop (I started with a downloaded Y-Wing font, then altered bits to make it more accurate) then printed out life size - this was then traced over onto some self-adhesive black vinyl and the vinyl was then cut out with a ruler and hobby knife.
The chin padding was done by cutting out some brown leather and supergluing it in place, the microphone is a cheap mic I cut up, and all raised greeblies were constructed from different thicknesses of plastic sheet as well as toy hubcaps, superglue bottles, screw covers, capacitors and dials.
This is the only WIP picture that I bothered to take - this is it after it's been sanded down, 2 spots have been filled and 2 colours of paint have been sprayed on. The kit also comes with the visor and 2 greeblies for the indentations - I've completely scrapped the greeblies as they look nothing like what should be there and made my own from found parts.
I've managed to get some great reference pictures for this - they're pretty rare and as such all of the helmets I've seen before have an incorrect vertically symmetrical paint scheme as the painter has just used the picture from the SW Chronicles of the left hand side and flipped it to do the opposite side. This incorrect symmetrical paint scheme can be seen on the new Y-Wing Pilot figure from Hasbro as well. And great reference pictures mean you can do things like this:
The original is on the left, mine is on the right.
Basically, I printed off the original image life size, scribbled over the back of it, then drew over it to leave a sort of paint-by-numbers outline on the helmet, which I then hand painted.And here's the finished article next to the real thing - original on the top row, my copy on the bottow row:
Everything but the text was done by hand with a paintbrush and some masking tape. The lettering was done on Photoshop (I started with a downloaded Y-Wing font, then altered bits to make it more accurate) then printed out life size - this was then traced over onto some self-adhesive black vinyl and the vinyl was then cut out with a ruler and hobby knife.
The chin padding was done by cutting out some brown leather and supergluing it in place, the microphone is a cheap mic I cut up, and all raised greeblies were constructed from different thicknesses of plastic sheet as well as toy hubcaps, superglue bottles, screw covers, capacitors and dials.
