How to Make Loki's Helmet

Ever since I have started making costumes, I have wanted to make Loki's Helmet. I tried making it out of craft foam, duct tape, pretty much every new technique I acquired I tried to make his helmet with....and and every one ended up in the trash. Then one night I was trying to fall asleep, when I had an Epiphany. What if I used card board and foam??? Okay probably not quite as exciting as it was at the time, but I think it worked very well. For some reason my horns started to bubble up which was annoying, but oh well.

I have not seen many Loki helmet builds, and all that I have seen cost like $100+, and used stuff like Worbla and Sintra, but even those tutorials were quite vague, so here's mine. This build cost about $40 dollars (you could probably do it for much less) and took about 20 hours to complete.

I made another Loki helmet that turned out better, you can click here to read about that one.

Because this helm is manly having stuff dry on it the whole time, I wanted to make sure everything set properly. I got a mannequin from the craft store, but its head was significantly smaller than mine, so I took some sewing stuffing and taped it on the head until it was the size I wanted.

I used....

• a mannequin head
• tape
• stuffing
• a cereal box, or other thin cardboard
• expanding foam
• card stock
• insulation foam
• spackling paste
• sandpaper
• wood filler
• clay
• gesso
• mod podge
• lots of patience
• epoxy
• primer
• gold spray paint
• whatever else I forgot to add on the list, but later mention

I hate patterning. I made all my patterns out of normal paper first, then I transferred it to card stock. If I can figure out how to PDF stuff, I add a document to this tutorial (please someone help me).

I then traced everything out on some cardboard. Nothing fancy, just an old cereal box I had lying around.

I cut everything out then carefully hot glued it all together. I would suggest covering your work area with a silicone baking sheet because hot glue doesn't stick to it and you get better results. The back of the helm was a little tricky so instead of having the edges of the pieces meet at 0 degrees, I held the edges together at a 180 degrees angle. That was quite confusing, but once your making it, it's not so difficult.

You could leave the helmet with just cardboard I suppose, but I wanted strength, and structure, so I coated it all in expanding foam. My expanding foam actually would not come out of the bottle, so I had to perform some surgery on the can. Needless to say I got angry and pretty much just banged it against things until everything useful fell off (the nozzle and spray thingie) and foam started spurting out

. After the cardboard was though-rally covered, I sprayed everything with water. I'm not really sure it water helps the foam cure more, or expand more, but everyone says to do it so *shrug*.

I had no real method to my madness, other than that I drew out the basic pieces, and then cut them out. Be careful here, I thought I was being pretty careful until I cut myself for the fourth time. I carved out some of the details. I would'nt recammend doing this because even though it seemed like a good idea at the time, I ended up removing them later because they just got in my way.

I was going to cover everything in Bondo, but I wanted something lighter, less toxic, and Bondo always cracks as small movements, and I needed this helmet to be flexible, so I can slip it on and off my head, so I just covered everything in spackling paste, sanded it down, then added another layer of spackling paste.

I traced and cut the horns out of 2 inch insulation foam, and carved it all out. Loki's horns are more triangular than circular, so I made sure to carve it accordingly.

I sanded the foam with 100 grit sand paper and covered it in spackling paste. After all of that was done, I put on some layers of Mod Podge, then covered the imperfections with wood filler, and sanded it until it was smooth. I coated it in three layers of Gesso, and let that dry.

I'm sure some parts of this you could skip, this whole build I had no clue what I was doing, but I would not recamend using both spackling paste and wood filler; it just takes extra time, and more sand paper

The helmet was not quite what I wanted, so I built some more parts up with clay, then covered it all in wood filler, and sanded away all of the pain Odin caused. I then covered it in a bunch of Mod Podge

I was going to use some sort of magnet contraption, to attach the horns, but I couldn't figure out how, so instead I scored the horn base and the helmet, and slathered on a bunch of 2 part epoxy, then stuck them to the horns. I used 6 minute epoxy, but it took around 20-40 minutes to actually be sturdy enough to not fall off. I then used clay to to help secure and add a more ascetically pleasing base.

I coated the clay in wood filler, then sanded everything away.

I started out with a sand-able primer, then went in with two coats of gold spray paint.

Now go, make people KNEEEEL!

If you would like to see how I made this out of foam click here