Hilde's Helmet

Hilde's helmet was a piece that haunted my dreams at the beginning of the build--it's very visible and super complex. In the end, it wasn't quite as bad as I had feared!

  

Since the helmet on the character model is disproportionately small, I started with a base helmet that fit my head very, very closely. I had an old plastic police helmet laying around that fit just right. I sawed off the excess pieces to get just a base and cut a craft foam flap for the base of the flare around the back of the helmet.

To get the flat piece to flare, I cut slots in the flap and inserted craft foam triangles until the foam flap sat the way I wanted it to.

Once the shape of the base helmet was right, I papier-mache'd the craft foam flap on both the inside and outside. With a solid base to work with, I drew in the details.

As per usual, I have some gaps in my photography, sorry! To make the first tier of the visor, I started with a newsprint pattern and cut/taped it apart to get the right curvature. Then I cut the shapes out of craft foam and began building up the raised detailing in apoxie sculpt. To conserve on apoxie clay, which is insanely expensive, I built up the crest running down the center of the helmet with paper clay first, then covered it in apoxie sculpt.

Once the under-visor was ready, I made a paper pattern for the bottom silhouette of the wolf visor so it would fit snugly over the entire deal. Once I was satisfied with the shape, I cut the base out of craft foam and began sculpting in paper clay to get a rough shape for the wolf. After the paper clay dried, I used an absolutely heinous amount of apoxie sculpt to make the wolf. This sculpt took much longer than the rest of the helmet--to build up the snout long enough, I let the clay cure and added more several times. Since I was planning on vacuum-forming both visors, I left off the details like the ears and teeth at this point.

At this point, I had gotten my wig and discovered to my utter horror that the helmet was too tight with the wig on! It was sheer luck that the helmet design includes a crest right up the middle--I pried it off of the base helmet, sawed it in half, and added about .75" to the width. This step was absolutely harrowing--the fragile apoxiesculpt details started pulling up off the helmet as we worked with it. Credit must be given to Foameo at this point for curtailing a major freak-out!

Once the helmet was assured to fit me without cutting off circulation to my ears, I built foam core braces for both visors, smeared some bondo on the insides for extra strength, and vacuum-formed them out of .040 white styrene. I will admit, I did a gleeful dance when I saw how well the wolf visor came out! I then sculpted the wolf's fine details (ears, teeth) directly onto the plastic.

Since I'd enlarged the helmet, I had to drill the holes for the visor mounting points a little farther forward than I'd meant to, but the fit was just as snug as I wanted. I used two drawer pulls from Menards to make the decorative hinges. The chin strap also attaches on the screw on the inside. A few coats of Gesso, Krylon plastic paints, a layer of weathering, and some clearcoat later, the helmet was complete!