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.

Step 1: Getting a Good Head Maniquinn

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.

Step 2: Materials

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

Step 3: Patterning and Tracing

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.

Step 4: Basic Structure

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.

Step 5: Slather It With Foam

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*.

Step 6: Carving That Sucker

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.

Step 7: Horns

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

Step 8: More Details and Sanding

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

Step 9: Attaching the Horns

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.