Last week I showed a simple way to make "Futuristic" looking combat armor. This week, I want to show how to make a helmet to go along with the armor, and how to add some extra details to your armor, to add that extra hint of belivability to your armor. First, the armor details.

While foam board works better for armor, because it doesn't have that honeycombing inside of it, it can be more expensive than getting free cardboard like I did. And since the build can be rather complex, I tried to keep costs down by using cardboard. To try to make it look less "Cardboard-y", I filled in a lot of the honeycombing with wood filler. I rubbed it all over the armor to get it a slightly different texture, and to add some strength to the cardboard.

It gave it an interesting texture, and made it far more matte, I went ahead and sanded it, and I liked how it looked a lot more. To me is looked a little bit more like solid formed sections rather than cardboard, so improvement. After I sanded it a little, I brought it outside and went over it with hammered gold again, I liked the texture it has, and it makes it look more like rough metal, so I kept it just hammered gold instead of layered silver onto it.

Next, I sketched some rectangles out on some foam board. While I thought that the substrate of the armor itself was a bit too large to be made solely out of foamboard, I think that making some of the details on the armor out of foam board can look better than doing it from cardboard alone.

Along with the foamboard paneling, I also found this great molded plastic piece, I think it came out of the box my cellphone came in, I don't remember, but spraypainted black I thought it would look really interesting, and can easily be some kind of life-support system on the front of the suit, like so..

After putting that in place, I got some of these nuts I got at the hardware store for 6 cents apiece, and I glue them on.

I think they can add an extra something to the foamboard panelling, and you can make it look a bit like rivets holding the panels in place.

Next, I added a chroma green rectangle to my wrist, along with a washer and a metal nut-button I found.

You can easily cover it up with a flap of cardboard, and pop it up when you're ready to "use" it, and key out the green, and add in any kind of animated "Wrist Computer" animation you can come up with.

Next, I did the same panelling, to the leg areas, adding in more 'rivets' to give it the same panelled look. You can really do any kind of geometric shapes for the extra panels, it's all a matter of personal taste, you can change their color, and do anything you want, but whatever you choose, the extra layer gives the armor a more three-dimensional look and makes it look much more "futuristic".

Something else that I think REALLY adds life to armor, is bullet hits. I use kind of randomized "star" patterns for dead on bullets strikes, and kind of "Sword Swipe" shapes for ricochets or grazes. I do the initial "star shape" with a solid black, then go over it lightly with a grey, to make the strike look like there is some vaporized residue on it. Any kind of energy weapons would probably have more grey, to give it more of an "ashed" look. But textured effects can really give life to the armor. If you're on a desert planet in your film, go over the armor real lightly with some earth tones and clay colors, any kind of warm dirt colors. For ice planets, a very light "frost" on everything with white can really sell it, along with lots of "crunching" sound effects to make it sound like your equipment is caked with ice and frost. When texturing your armor, keep your environment in mind. Now that we're mostly done with the basic armor concepts, lets move on to the HELMET.

I started with, as a kind of structure for my helmet, with an empty water jug. You can use any Gallon or more jug for this, but I like these and they are pretty easy to find and don't smell funny like Bleach jugs.

Cut the top off of the jug, and kind of cut a place for your neck, and try to cut it up to fit your head.

It keeps me safe from the clowns...

ANYWAY. After I made sure it fit my bulbous head, I brought it out and spraypainted it black, once against using the latex water-based spray paint, rather than enamel, because I am simply too lazy to look up what enamel will do to the plastic that the jug is made out of, and I don't want to find out from personal experience.

After it dried, I tried it on, to see how much I had to cut away so I could see. I sketched my approximate sightline with chalk, then cut it out with scissors.

I shaped a basic "face mask" with more cardboard panels that I hot glued together at the seams. And I glued them to the ski mask, and hard plastic shell on the sides.

I panelled another piece on top, and for the sides, I started layering rectangles of cardboard in a kind of overlapping pattern, similar to a Samurai helmet.

After I added a few more pieces, I get it a layer of spraypaint. The "Bubble Mask" was the front of a blister pack that I saved from the Holidays and cut up. I thought it looked very "spacy" and thought it'd bee goot for a space helmet.

Other than needing some of the seams filled with wood filler to cover up the honeycombing in the cardboard, and needing some extra paint to make it look more metallic, I think it came out pretty decently, all for almost free. The only thing I paid for was the ski-mask ($3 I believe), everything else was trash that was going to be thrown away that I simply asked politely for.

One last thing, if you want a 'mirrored' finish on your helmet face mask, you can simple get some gold, or bronze leaf, and go over the plastic, it's almost translucent, so you should be able to see through it fine. Otherwise, scratch a couple of tiny holes out of the leafing, you should still be able to see out of the holes, but them to be small enough to not be noticable.

Hope all of you potential space rangers are satiated now, see you all next week!

-Wes