Boba Fett Helmet
Based off of the helmt used byBoba Fett in the Holiday Special.

Actor: Don Francks (or Gabriel Dell?) (voice)

Boba Fett is an interplanetary bounty hunter who attempted to betray Luke Skywalker and the others to Darth Vader by pretending to be a "friend" and gaining their confidence. He did not succeed, but escaped to return another day.

Fett appears for the first time ever in the cartoon during the Holiday Special. He later shows up in The Empire Strikes Back, of course, to hunt down Han Solo for both Jabba and Darth Vader's benefit.

"No lower life form is worth going hungry for... friend."


As you can see the helmet color went from a solid blue to a multi-blue throughout the cartoon.



The helmet I am using is a "mystery" Fett Helmet. I know the guy who makes these so I could not pass up a helmet from him. I went over to the shop and got to help cast my Boba Fett helmet with him. Here it is in the raw casted form, as you can see there is some flashing that needs to be trimmed and removed.

I have this thing about working on resin type helmets. I start off by painting the inside flat black. When that is dry I always put in two coats of clear polyurethane.

I did not paint the visor area black since this will be cut out later for the visor lens.

I did some preliminary clean up on the helmet. By this I mean I cleaned up the flashing, sanded the helmet down, ect. This way I can then figure out what parts of the helmet need to be filled in, sanded down some more, fixed, cleaned up, whatever. This is the beginning of making the helmet pretty and smooth.

I have been working on cleaning up the helmet the way I see fit for this project. One thing to remember is this is Boba Fett; in the movies his helmet is not all pretty but scratched and beat up. In the cartoon he is all nice and smooth and pretty.

On the back the rim is not lined up evenly. So with some bondo I sanded down the messed up area and placed some bondo to rebuild it. All sanded and cleaned up the rim lines up much better now. It may not be perfect but it looks much better.

I also used the bondo to fill in any gaps or straches that I did not like.
Now it is time to sand it all down and give it a once over.

With the helmet all sanded down it is time to clean up the detail parts.

The eye piece that sits on top of the stalk was really messed up and had lots of air bubbles. So I filled it in with bondo and smoothed it out.

Now that I am happy with the way the helmet and deail parts are looking, lets cut out the vents in the back of the helmet and cut the visor out from the helmet. I waited to do this last of the prep work. If you cut out the visor early the helmet is not as sturdy for the rough work of sanding and preping.

Now that the vent slits and visor are cut out from the helmet I sanded and cleaned up the newly cut out areas.

I do believe the helmet is ready for painting. Before we do that we have to wash the helmet and detail parts off with soap and water.


The Fett helmet is now all cut out and ready to go.

This is the Star Wars Holiday Special Boba Fett figure from Hasbro (2007).

As you can see Hasbro decided to make Boba Fett's helmet and some of the armor metallic in color. I really like the metallic look of the helmet. I am going to paint my Boba Fett helmet in metallic colors as well. I am not going to be making my Boba Fett helmet all shinny and clean. Since the helmet kit has the dent / blaster mark on it I will give the helmet some weathering to make it look a bit used as a Bounty Hunter's helmet would be in the Star Wars Universe, the Star Wars Universe is not a clean universe but a used and lived in universe.

Ok. All the parts are washed and ready to go. I started off with priming everything flat grey. I will give everything a once over and then begin the complex painting process.

When the primer was dry I gave the helmet and detail parts a look over to make sure it was the way I wanted it. I then sprayed on the base coat with silver.

*Detail parts not shown.

The I gave the entire helmet and helmet parts a quick black wash. This will start the weather process. Remember the Star Wars Universe is used and Boba Fett's Helmet was never really all the clean.
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Next I started painting the light metallic blue of the helmet. I am using Dupli-Color Truck, Van, and SUV paint T155 Light Blue (M). This color in my opinion looks pretty close of the color used on the action figure. But before I start painting I need to mask off areas and add some toothpaste into areas that I want to remain silver. The tooth paste will block the paint but around the edges give it that natural flaking look. You want to use a plain paste, nothing fancy.
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After the paint had dried I washed off the tooth paste to see what silver remained. Looking good!

I then again gave the entire helmet a black wash for weathering.
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