deftspyder
New Member
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.
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.
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love:love It's looking so good. I'm very excited to see this progress along.
