Voltron Paladin helmet foam build WIP

Hey all, this is my first attempt at scratch building any sort of prop or costume piece, or at least my first attempt since I was a kid and using more advance materials and techniques than just paper grocery bags and masking tape. For my first attempt at working in foam I decided to go with the Voltron Paladin helmet after watching Evil Ted's tutorial video of him making it on YouTube, it didn't hurt that the pattern was free either. This project isn't actual for me though, I'm making it as a surprise for my nephew who loves the show and it gives me an excuse to actually try my hand at making something with foam.

Since my nephew is only 5 the first thing that I did before even printing out the patterns I scaled them down by 15% since I didn't know exactly how large of a helmet the patterns would make. This actually took me a while because, despite being an expert at Photoshop, I kept on forgetting to scale them down evenly so I ended printing and cutting out the patterns 2 or 3 times before I was certain that I had done it right.

After printing and cutting I traced over the pattern on to my foam sheets and then cut those out. I found out that cutting foam isn't that hard but a good sharp blade is absolutely key to getting a clean cut. Here are my foam pieces all cut out. I made a mistake when cutting these out, what I thought were supposed to be small darts were actually just meant to be registration marks, so I now have a lot of little holes that I'll need to cover that I wouldn't have had I watched the video again before cutting.


After cutting them out I did a little quick shaping with a heat gun and what Evil Ted calls a "foam anvil" which is nothing more than 3" acrylic dome glued to a piece of PVC pipe on a stand.



And that's it for day 1 of my build so far.

Day 2

All I did was just glue the top piece and closed it. The seams are a little rough and the top part of the seams didn't quite stick together the way I wanted but it worked well enoough.


Day 3

I went and glued the side pieces closed and I also used a bit more glue along the top of the seams on the top piece to close the seams up a little better. Once the glue was set I then went and attached the side pieces to the top. It went a little better than when I glued the top piece closed but still a bit rough, but not too bad for my first time. Like with the top piece, the side pieces attached with a slight gap at the top, something that I would fix the next day.

good start, stick with the evil ted video and you cant go wrong

gothic said:

good start, stick with the evil ted video and you cant go wrong

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Thanks. Evil Ted's video is got me started with this and I'm constantly referring back to it, I just wish I had done so before cutting the foam, otherwise I would have known that what I thought were small darts were really just registration marks. I probably also should have given it another watch before I started gluing anything together, I might have gotten cleaner seams if I had, but now I know that I should start with the top/outer edge of the seams first and then work my way in/down.

its like they "say measure twice cut once" with youtube i watch ten times do once lol, as for cleaner seams that is an art form of its own, all you can do is get the best seam you can then if its good foam you can sand it smooth if its gaps nearly all of us use a filler. golden you tube rule no one is gonna post a video when it didn't come out as planned everyone messes up

I would love to see the finished product! One thing I noticed is that you are cutting out the tiny alignment tabs. I don't think those are supposed to be cut, only marked. Other than that though great job. I made my daughter a generic knight's helmet using his base. His tutorials are great.

CptPunchface said:

I would love to see the finished product! One thing I noticed is that you are cutting out the tiny alignment tabs. I don't think those are supposed to be cut, only marked. Other than that though great job. I made my daughter a generic knight's helmet using his base. His tutorials are great.

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Yeah, I know. I didn't realize that at first until I rewatched the video. Because of that, it's taking me a bit more time to fill in the gaps in the seams because I not only have gaps, I also have holes.

Anywho, I suppose it's time to post some more progress pics. Since I last posted progress pics I've attached the lower sides of the helmet and have been spending the rest of my time slathering lots and lots of Kwik Seal to fill the gaps in seams and the holes resulting from the cut out registration marks.

More progress has been made, here are pictures from Day 6 or so, I finished filling in the seams and holes and finally added the front trim piece.


After that was done I went over the helmet with yet more Qwik Seal, even though is for a 5 year old the perfectionist in me wants to try to make the seams and holes as invisible as possible. So, after doing that for another couple of days I finally decided that enough was enough and it was time to time seal/primer my build. So here it is after a coat of white plastidip.

Of course Plastidipping the helmet showed off the flaws better so after it dried I went back and added yet more Kwik Seal in an attempt to clean it up.

Last night I sanded down the Kwik Seal from the day before and I laid down a coat of white paint from a rattle can. I didn't bother to take any pictures of the white because I did it at night and I also figured that it really wouldn't look all that much different from the pics of it with just Plastidip.

Since my last post I've finished with the Kwik Seal work, I think I've done enough with it and if I keep on going with it I probably wouldn't finish the helmet until Christmas, at earliest. So I decided that enough was enough and moved on the painting stage. Actually, before I actually started painting I tried to smooth things out just a bit more with one more go with the Kwik Seal, let that dry, sanded it a bit, and hit it with white spray paint. I think I might have sanded it a little too much in spots though because I got little pin ***** holes in certain spots and I suspect that the spray paint and Kwik Seal don't mix.

I "fixed" the problem by hitting those areas with yet more spray paint, hoping to fill the little holes, which it did, but not completely. So, more Kwik Seal again and more sanding, and more spray paint got me the same results, so I let it be for now.

Next I masked off all the areas that I wanted to keep white so I could hit it with some black spray paint.


As much as I masked it off I didn't do as good of a job as I had thought and hoped that I did and had a fair amount of overspray of the black. This I fixed by simply painting over with white acrylic paint and a brush. I also used white acrylic over the white areas with the pitting and this worked exactly as I hoped and covered up all of those little holes.

After touching up the white areas I then went in and painted the blue trim that goes in the recess in the middle of the helmet and the front of the mandibles. The template actually calls for small pieces with openings cut in them to go in front of the mandibles but I cheated and simply masked off part of them and painted in the blue.


What's not visible is a couple of coats of glow in the dark paint on the blue on the mandibles. I'm also going to add the same glow in the dark paint to the blue strip in the middle of the helmet in order to give the blue a nice glowing effect at night. Evil Ted originally was going to put reflective tape on his and so was I but I decided that glow in the dark paint might be a cooler effect for a 5 year old.

All that remains now is to spray a clear coat on the helmet followed by a layer of gloss. Once that's done the only thing left will be to trim and fit the visor and I'll finally be done.

For anyone interested in making this helmet yourself and follows this post I just want to say that it really doesn't take that long to make, I'm just slow. As you might be able to tell from my early posts I'd only do one thing a day. Printing and cutting the patterns would be one day, cutting the foam another, gluing on the next, and so on. I think that if you were to really sit down and work on it it would take less than a week to make, less if you're an old hand at working with foam.

Great job Rb Evil Ted is awesome you can't go wrong there.

I've finally finished the helmet, even though I'm posting it today I actually finished it on Sunday. All I did in the end was to apply a little more glow in the dark paint to the blue areas, apply a gloss coat, and add the visor. So here it is, it's a bit rough but I'm overall happy with the results considering that it was my first attempt at working in foam and, most importantly of all, my nephew loves it.

Here are pics of the finished helmet.