I took a fall, and the helmet saved my life. Tragically, this also meant that the helmet was also spent as you cannot re-use a helmet.
So, I needed to get a new helmet, and I thought it’d be a perfect time to paint my helmet. It’s a huge part of my outfit everyday, so might as well give it a paint job.
Masking was the first step, and extremely tedious, I knew I wanted light colors and I didn’t want it to unevenly land on the inner foam. I also had bad experience with foam being melted by spray paint propellant (unsure if it would happen here), but wanted to be cautious.
The base white coat was less so for primer, and mostly because I wanted a white base, and streaks of blue on top.
I own a gas mask, so might as well use it.
I freeballed the hell out of this paint job. I used a lot of cardboard shields and lot of corners of cardboard as a paint brush. Probably should have worn gloves. Oh well.
My primary techniques were:
- Cut a triangle out of a piece of cardboard, use it as a fuzzy spray mask
- Spray a bunch of excess paint onto a edge piece of cardboard, then smear it across the helmet
- With various stages of wetness of a base coat, drag cardboard to create a sort of blend between scoring/blended textures.
- Spray extremely slowly to create a spattering effect
- Standard spray fast arcing
- Go back over with acrylic marker to create squiggles, highlights, and the front side X’s.
First pass looks pretty good!
The final step in this process was to put a protective (and cosmetic) clear coat. Due to the highly curved nature, I opted to use SprayMax 2k Clear Coat. Extensive online reddit and YT research said that I should wait 7 days before putting on the clear coat, so I made sure to do that.
The final spray coat really makes the colors pop in the sun and it makes me very happy.
Thank you to Aliris for taking these photos for me
Notes For Next Time
Next time I do this, I should order better spray paint can tips and finer tip acrylic markers. Specifically:
- The default spray paint nozzles are not precise enough. I ordered some custom tips — to use for next time I guess.
- I want the marker to be more like a pen — 100% opacity paint, and a fine tip.
- I only did 3 clear coats this time — next time I would bias for maybe 4 or 5.
- If I had access a larger garage, I would do it there. I ran into an issue where the clear coat started to absorb/capture the moisture of the SF air at night, and was clouding up. I luckily ran upstairs and grabbed a blow dryer and forced the moisture out. It was such a relief to see the clouding get evaporated out in real time.
Appendix:
Here is some articles I found about waiting before spraying clear coat.