Amber Brite

The Saga of the Mando Helmet

Added 2020-07-11 15:31:46 +0000 UTC

Wow, I really went incommunicado there for a while. I'm so sorry, everyone. I have been heads down working on this project for so long, I basically vanished from social media in general for a month. Lemme show you what I been working on though!

This is a gallery of all the steps my Mandalorian Helmet went through this past month!

It started out as a paper template with a dome made of EVA foam. If I'm being honest, it wasn't a very good template, either. It came with all these extra pieces and parts, almost like it wanted you to assemble a separate inside portion as well. Half of that template wound up in the trash, and I just freehanded it instead.

One the papercraft was done, I went and created the trashiest, cheapest mold I've ever made in my life, and cast it out of resin. The reason I did this was because I knew I would be sanding this helmet for the rest of my entire life, and I didn't want the paper to cause any problems if I sanded that far down.

From there, as you can see in the screenshots, it became a constant back and forth of adding bondo, spot putty, freeform air, or other filler agents to build the helmet up, only to sand it back down... then I'd have 2 or 3 people mark any imperfections they saw (the more eyes the better!) and begin the process again! This went on and on, through something like 20 iterations... each time we'd patch up one imperfection, it'd make it easier to catch another. And another, and another!

If I were building this just for myself, I have to be honest, I would have stopped halfway through and called it good enough. But I have to thank my friends who kept pushing me to get just a little more perfect... because the end result is so much cleaner and I'm so much happier with it.

The next step from here is gonna be creating a proper mold of the finished helmet (just a couple last minute details I wanna touch up first) and then I'm gonna start casting & selling it on my website. Which I am super excited for!

And of course, once it's at that point? I'm gonna take one of the casts and convert it into a Twi'lek Mando helmet for Rio. I have soooooo many upgrade ideas for Rio, now that her base kit is officially done. And the helmet is gonna be a big part of that. Can't wait to show you!

Thanks so much to all of you for bearing with me during my radio silence. You guys are the best. 😍😍😍

Let me know if you have any questions about the process, I'll be happy to answer! I wanna write a tutorial on this whole process so any questions you have might help me know what to include!