How To: Red Hood Helmet Tutorial Part 1

How To: Red Hood Helmet Tutorial part 1

All righty! Before we start, let me just say that there are many amazing helmet tutorials out there on youtube, cosplay.com, and costuming forums that with a little tweaking and care can probably turn out amazing results. So if you feel that I did something stupid (I probably did) or unnecessary feel free to deviate.

Time frame

If you have a good week off, you could probably finish it.

Materials used

Iron Man Face Plate ($10)

Cardboard

Hot Glue Gun

Can of Bondo ($12)

Plastic Spreader ($1)

Spot Putty ($5)

Polly Filler ($3)

Sandpaper ($5)

**an electric sander ~optional~

Red Spray Paint

(You can find most of the materials used at any hardware store)

First thing you need is to make a base. You’ll have to find sturdy, flexible material to make a mold of your head. A paper mache mold would do fine, but if you haven’t the means, you can make a mold out of cardboard.

to make the base, I roughly followed these tutorials:

http://www.cosplay.com/showthread.php?t=97106

http://jason-peter-todd.tumblr.com/post/3135425844/j-todd-cosplay-wip-2

Got lazy and used an Iron Man half-mask. If you’re twice as lazy as me & have cash to blow, you can get a full body mask for $25.

After some adjusting, you should get a base that nicely on your head. Make sure it’s not too tight before you start anything else. Make sure there aren’t any gaps (I left plenty and paid for it later). The smoother your surface is, the easier it is to apply bondo, and the easier it is to sand.

An ideal helmet mold, made of cardboard, paper mache, or papercraft, should look approximately like this (minus the mouth gap; this is taken from the cosplay.com tutorial):

Part 2 will involve bondo, sanding, and the sucky working conditions you want to avoid.