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THE HELMET PAINT JOB - WITH A DIFFERENCE
By Steve Whyman.
Crossbow Calendars’ Pencil King
As I do all the artwork for CROSSBOW CALENDARS, using the airbrush for all the colour pictures, and pencil for all the black and white ones, the idea of doing a pencil drawing on a helmet has always appealed to me, so I thought I’d give it a go!
Because I’ve done helmets before using paint, I figured the process should be similar.
Well, where do you start? The first thing – and this is probably the difficult bit – is to come up with an idea for the design. I’ve always been fascinated by the work of Swiss surrealist painter and sculptor H. R. Giger, so I thought I’d borrow some of his images as the basis for my creation. So over the next couple of weeks I surfed the net looking for the right material and made preliminary sketches on paper and the computer to blend together a design - already, 2 weeks gone and I hadn’t even touched a helmet yet!
The next thing was to find a helmet. I didn’t want a helmet with too many trick vents on the top or huge air scoops, as this would only spoil the design, so I decided to use a 4 year old Shoei RF700 which was sitting in my cupboard. I never really wore it anyway, favoring an Arai Quantum F as my everyday lid.
The first thing to do is strip it down. This involves taking the helmet completely apart – and I mean completely! Remove the visor and all the visor mechanism. Remove the inner cheek pads and chin bar lining (these usually come out OK. On older helmets they are glued in place but on modern helmets they are often made removable for cleaning). Remove the main interior crown section of the lining (this is definitely not meant to be removed and is always glued in to place and is very difficult to wrestle out of the helmet)! Some helmet painters leave this in place and just mask it up to save time.
In my opinion this is bad practice as some of the vapours given off by various paints and lacquers will start to melt the polystyrene core. You will never know until the day when, heaven forbid, you need it to save your life! Remove the vents and then every painter’s nightmare, the rubber-edging strip round the base of the helmet, and even worse, the visor seal. These bits are glued in place and have to be teased off very gently otherwise they tear and you ruin the whole helmet – you won’t get a replacement easily!
Again, some painters leave these on and mask them up, but on the finished article, you can always tell! The only parts you don’t remove are the straps as these are riveted to the shell, so I wrap these in plastic and masking tape and tape them up into the inside of the helmet out of harm’s way. That’s it, about an hour’s work and I’m ready.
Wash the interior lining – this is easy now it’s
all removed (1 hour). Next start to strip the helmet of all its lacquer,
transfers and paint - it is easier to start with a plain white shell but this
wasn’t the case for me. This is quite a big step, the first time you touch it
with the 400 grit wet n dry there’s no going back! You turn your once shiny
painted lid into a dull scratched mess (this always upsets me, especially when
it’s a brand spanking virgin £400 Arai!). It’s important to get this stage
right though. Any slight imperfections in the helmets surface will haunt you
through every subsequent stage of the process. (2 hours). Clean and degrease
thoroughly to give a good surface for the primer.
The first coat of paint is Createx Auto Air base coat white mixed with a couple of drops of bonding agent and catalyst to aid adhesion. Heat set this, rub down with 600 grit and apply a second coat and again heat set till it’s completely dry. Rub down again with 600 grit and clean, this is now my white canvas that everything else will be built up on. (2 hours).
Over the course of the next 3 WEEKS draw on the design using my trusty Staedtler propelling pencils. For this job I used ;
0.5 mm HB, B, 2B. 0.3 mm HB, 2B. 0.7 mm 2B. 0.9 mm 2B. 2mm 6B. 4B Graphite Stick. 6 different types of eraser (not because I make a lot of mistakes but because they give different effects) and 3 different types of scalpel.
This is only a fraction of the pencils I would normally use for my usual work for Crossbow on illustration board, but I found the surface of the helmet very slippery and not very workable. Why do I use Staedtler propelling pencils?…………..because I like em! All pencils are different so I like to stick to what I’m used to and I always use propelling pencils because the point always stays the same size. The other problem with drawing on a helmet shell is one of supporting it whilst trying to do detailed pencil work.
In order to protect what I’d already drawn meant masking it up as I went along to avoid smudging the work. The trouble is, if you apply masking tape to a surface and leave it on too long, when you come to remove it, the glue stays behind. Now this is bad enough when you’re airbrushing, but getting glue off a pencil drawing is very tricky business without destroying the picture! However I do have various methods. The problem is made worse by constantly leaning on the masking tape making it even more difficult to remove. To ease the problem you should always use top quality masking tape (Tesa or 3M are the ones I prefer) and reduce its tackiness to the bear minimum before you apply it. Every now and then, remove it and re-mask with fresh tape.
After I’d completed the main drawings it was now time to add the background. This sounds a strange way of going about things, but when airbrushing - unlike a lot of other painting – the subject matter is completed before the background. This means masking off the drawing again and cutting round with a scalpel. Normally I would use Frisk, which is a clear low tack film specifically designed for airbrushing but this stuff won’t stick to a helmet easily especially when it’s covered in graphite! So I used a combination of masking tape and transfer tape (which is a bit more see- through so you can see where you’re cutting). The background was done using an IWATA Custom Micron B airbrush with Com-Art Transparent Black paint. The effect is achieved by using a loose masking technique and various home made stencils – oh, and yes, years of practice! (2 or 3 hours).
As the air vents on my lid were originally a strange purple colour, these had to be taken apart, airbrushed black, and put on one side ready for a quick whiff of the clear coat.
Now the design is complete, I clean it up ready for the first blast of clear coat. Now I’m not an experienced paint sprayer or anything, so I have to make do with the garage as my base to apply this highly toxic concoction. I heat the garage up to room temperature and take the compressor and all the kit in there ready for the spraying. Professional sprayers would use a proper spray booth with sophisticated air extraction systems and air fed respirators, but as I’m only using a small amount of lacquer, I make do with a good pair of overalls, an expensive facemask and a big extraction fan!
So I mix the lacquer, and give the helmet (which is
supported on a stand) a good coat of the stuff and then get out into the fresh
air as soon as possible! After about 20 minutes the first coat goes almost dry
and it’s time to apply the second coat. Unfortunately this turned to a very
nice orange peel effect! I think the cause of this was that the helmet had
warmed up too much in the waiting period; still, I’d be able to correct this
later. Every job goes tits up at some point! After about an hour the helmet is
touch dry and I’m able to bring it back in the house, stick it in the airing
cupboard and leave it overnight to cure. Luckily, as soon as it is touch dry,
the smell of the lacquer disappears completely, otherwise my better half would
kill me if all the towels and things smelt like a paint shop!
The next job was to sand down the lacquer to take out any small imperfections – in my case, to get rid of the orange peel! I started off with 600 grit and finally finished with 1200 to give a nice smooth finish. All the sanding is done wet with a bit of added soap so I can "feel" what’s happening. I once tried to use power tools for sanding and polishing but with something as small as a helmet, it’s easy to catch an edge and ruin the whole job in the blink of an eye! Then I applied the Letraset credits on either side of the shell, no problem. The only other thing to do now was to apply the Shoei logo. This is simple basic airbrushing, apply masking, draw out logo, cut out with a scalpel and apply Createx satin gold. Heat set with hairdryer and remove the masking. Now it’s back out to the garage to hit it with the clear stuff, for this helmet, about 5 coats.
The following day when the lacquer has gone off, sand to a smooth dull finish with 1200 grit
This gets rid of all the little blemishes. Now I start the long boring bit, about 5 hours of T-cutting
to get back to a mirror-like finish. When I was happy,
it was time to reassemble the helmet. Just before doing that it was a good
opportunity to fit the stereo speakers and build the microphone into the chin
section for the custom built intercom system. This means everything is hidden in
the lining making it very unobtrusive. The re-fit is exactly the reverse of
stripping it down, obviously, just as difficult to get it perfect, especially
using super glue to fix the rubber strips. Again one slip and you’re
knackered! Then I spent about 2 or 3 hours with Autoglym Resin polish to get the
final finish.
So there you have it. About 5 weeks from concept to finished article, with about 100 hours of actual work in between!
If you do ever have a helmet professionally painted, don’t ever complain about having to part with three or four hundred quid for a good job. There’s one hell of a lot of work involved!
Would I sell it? No, but if I did, I’d expect at least a grand, purely because of the amount of artwork involved.
Will I do one for you? Well I’d love to, but time is precious and it’s time to get back to some proper artwork for Crossbow, which keeps me busy for most of the year.
Steve Whyman THE PENCIL KING
