rvb4life said:
Well thanks, lol. I wouldn't be the first person to use styrene for a prop build, though; it's quite a commonly-used material within the hobby. I'm just one of the first who have used it as the basis for HALO armour. Given my years of experience using it for numerous scratch-built props, I'm very comfortable with using it.
.45 Calibre said:
someone should write a tutorial on how to use styrene, cuz the helm looks awsome
Thanks! It's nice to know people enjoy the work I've done. I have to admit, there have been a few times during this project where I was wondering if I should rethink my methods given how much time and effort was going into it compared to others armour builds, but decided to stick with it.
However, in light of my agonizingly-slow progress at this point, I am thinking that once done with the helmet, maybe for the rest of it I should just build up the base Pep models, resin/fiberglass and then detail the rest of it with styrene. It's just, if I want this to be ready for DragonCon in August, I may have to switch up my methods after all in order to meet that deadline.
At least the helmet will be 100% styrene, lol.
Anyway, as requested I managed to take a few more pics of its current stage of completion. The first set of pics I'm posting here are to show how I've sanded/rounded out some of the sharp geometric edges/angles from the base Pep model:
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 12
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 13
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 14
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 15
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 16
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 17
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 18
As can be seen, I managed to round out the jaw area of the helmet (nice curves, lol), as well as the sides of the crown (top) of the helmet. I still have a little work to do on the middle seam going from front to back on the recessed area behind the top vents, but all in all I think I've done some good work on rounding it out.
Also, as I'm sure everyone has noticed in these pics, I started with some test painting using the colour I found was a pretty close to the Legendary helmet; Dupli-color "GM Lime Green" (paint code CDSGM423). I figured, since I was priming part of it anyway to look for flaws I might well as spray a little of my choice paint on there to see what it could look like, heh.
The next set of pics shows a direct comparison between my helmet and the Legendary helmet:
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 19 (Colour comparison)
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 20 (Colour comparison)
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 21 (Colour comparison)
Mk VI Helmet -- Pic 22 (Colour comparison)
Compared to the Legendary helmet, my choice of colour is clearly
waaay too light. Then again, it's not like I had the Legendary helmet with me in the store to compare when looking for a suitable colour, lol. Don't want to be looking like a walking fruit or anything, though. I don't want that "candied" look to my armour; I want something more representative of the in-game model.
So, I'm thinking if I use a dark grey or black primer underneath (will be doing the weathering using another method) that should darken it enough. Hell, it's worked on other prop builds I've done, where the top colour had to be darker than it was right out of the spray can.
That's about it in a nutshell, I guess. Not much more progress to show, and probably less than what others were expecting/hoping, but with how crazy-busy I've been as of late it's better than nothing...
EDIT: As for a "How to Build with Styrene" tutorial, if I'd known people might be interested in seeing how that's done with something like this, I would've taken more progress pics as I went along. But, I was so excited when I got started with this I couldn't help but just fly through the assembly process, lol. I guess I could always make a tutorial of sorts, using the method I used for the helmet, on one of the other armour pieces when I start work on another part of it.