That's me, at Elf Fantasy Fair Arcen last year. And this post will be about the helmet I'm wearing! My first helmet was inspired by Gimli's helmet from Lord Of The Rings, but it was very uncomfortable to wear. I had used a steel salad bowl as a base (no, I'm not kidding), and wearing it for a full day gave me a very bad headache.
The new helmet is based on a pattern by Evil Ted Smith, and it's entirely made from EVA foam. If you're looking for excellent patterns for all sorts of foam armor parts, check out his store, it's definitely worth the money!
Materials
- Thick paper for the patterns
- EVA foam (10, 5 and 2 mm)
- Contact cement
- Super glue
- Hot glue
- Acrylic caulk
- Flexi Paint
- Acrylic paints
- Satin acrylic clearcoat
- Oil paints (water mixable)
- Upholstery foam
- Hobby knife
- Dremel rotary tool and sanding bits
- Heat gun
Building the helmet
I printed the pattern on thick drawing paper, taped the different parts together and cut out the pattern pieces. For the bulk of the helmet, I used 10mm EVA foam floor mats. The texture will be on the inside, so it's not necessary to sand it away.
The helmet itself consists of only four pieces of foam. I used a heat gun to shape the foam, and glued everything together with contact cement. The rings on the sides are for mounting the horns. Those were quite a bit more difficult than the helmet!
The horns are made from 5mm foam, and require a steady hand and quite a bit of patience to put together. Perhaps the most important thing with these patterns are the alignment markings. Especially with complex shapes, like these horns, proper alignment is essential! It took me a while to put them together, but in the end, I had two impressive horns!
At first, I wanted to mount the horns just like that. My wife suggested I cut some grooves into them, to make them look more organic, like real animal horns. I hesitated at first, and thought I could achieve the right look by just painting, but in the end I followed her advice, and I'm glad I did.
I mounted the horns, and added the rest of the details. Some were on the pattern, others were improvised as I went along. For example, the three spikes on top of the helmet, and the plate that looks like it's riveted in place. I fixed the seams that needed fixing with acrylic caulk, and made some dents and scratches with my rotary tool.
Painting
The next step: painting! A while ago, I bought some Flexi Paint, a paint made especially for EVA foam props. As the name implies, it's very flexible, and adheres perfectly to foam. I have used it on a few props, but I must say, I'm not a huge fan of it. It paints well, and can be sprayed with an airbrush when properly diluted, but what I don't like is this: the color changes drastically when it dries! Now, most paints, especially acrylics, do this, but in this case, the difference is huge. I mixed some gray (there's only a limited number of colors available, so you'll have to mix your own a lot), but it dried to an almost black finish.
If you're ok with this behavior and you're good at mixing and matching colors, this is a very good paint. I, however, am not that good at it. But no worries, the paint is also an excellent foam primer, so I gave my helmet a base coat with it, and then painted over it with regular acrylics.
I used my Badger single action airbrush for most of the base coat. As I'm writing this, I'm without airbrush, though. I still have the airbrush, but no compressor. At the time, I borrowed some airbrush equipment from my brother. He had a compressor and double action airbrush and wasn't using it, so I could borrow it. I had bought the single action airbrush for painting larger areas quickly. A single action, external mix airbrush can handle thicker paints, so you don't need expensive, airbrush-ready paints. In the meantime, he needed his airbrush equipment back, so number one on my shopping list is an airbrush compressor.
After the basecoat, I applied a black wash, white drybrushing and finally a metallic drybrushing with either silver and pewter, for the steel parts, or bronze and brass, for the bronze parts. I'm glad I cut the grooves into the horns, because a simple brown wash was all that was needed to make them look more organic.
When all the paint had dried, I gave the entire helmet a clearcoat, and finally, I weathered it some more with water mixable oil paint. This is the first time I used oil paint, and I like it a lot! The advantage of oil paint over acrylic for weathering is the long drying time of oil paint. Weathering required very thin coats of paint, and acrylics would dry in less than a minute. Oil paints dry much slower (I'm talking days), so you have plenty of time to get the effect you want. On the following picture, the right side of the helmet has been weathered, the left side hasn't.
And finally, after everything has dried, there's only one more thing to do: fitting! I used 5 cm thick strips of upholstery foam for that, and glued them to the inside of the helmet with hot glue. This is a trial and error process, but luckily, it's easy to rip it back out if you make a mistake. After a few attempts, the helmet fit snugly.
I wore the helmet for a full day at Elf Fantasy Fair, without any headaches. Unfortunately, the weather gods weren't exactly on our side that day. Somewhere in the afternoon it started raining, and we headed back to the hotel early because we were soaked. The next day, we didn't even put on our costumes because it just kept on raining, and just went to the festival in our regular clothes. Ah, well, better luck next time!
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