It has been a while since I updated only because my work and life schedule has not allowed for much time to spent on the project. Do not assume the dates on these posts reflect how long it would take you to make your own, as that would be far from reality and a bit discouraging. The truth of the matter is that I've maybe put in a total of four to five hours of work spread over time since the part 5 post.
In the previous post you saw the first layer of celluclay mixture applied to the helmet. Since then I sanded the helmet down, applied another coat of mixture (allowed to dry overnight), sanded again, applied another coat of mixture (allowed to dry overnight), sanded, and worked out some curvature details with a final coat of the celluclay (dried, and then sanded once more). That works out to about 3-4 days of time it took because of how long it takes for the pulp to dry.
Sanding the celluclay after it dried has been an arduous task, be sure to have a sanding block nearby or else your hands and fingers will be very worn out and it will take longer. Of course, you could always use an electric sander but I imagine this would be too rough on the malleable cardboard structure below and cause cracks to fix time and time again.
Some definite issues I ran into (and hopefully you can avoid) were the realization that the helmet isn't properly shaped along the jaws similar to the show prop. Half of this was because of the shape of my head, the other half was because I didn't have reference material on-hand at all times (and 100% because I'm a complete beginner at this and have no clue what I'm doing). Keep reference material nearby, it has become a big hassle and a time-waster for me to have to fix things when I could have fixed it much quicker in the cardboard stage.
One other unfortunate event was when I broke part of the front of the helmet. Lesson learned: Have a proper stand for your helmet. The two foam pieces I used as a wannabe mannequin couldn't support the weight/center of gravity of the helmet and it fell over a time or two causing the break and a couple of cracks which have been very time consuming to fix. After the full break, I cut out the cardboard behind it because it was warped and likely wouldn't hold any sculpting shape properly.
After I was satisfied with the general shape of the helmet (something I had to accept because there's no way it can be perfect at this stage and I'd rather not start over), I applied a coat of Dap Dry-Dex which is essentially dry wall spackling. It goes on pink and dries white a lot quicker than the celluclay.
This was much easier to sand too but be sure you are in a well ventilated area and don't mind a mess because there will be white dust EVERYWHERE even after a few minutes. I didn't apply a coat to the entire helmet because it was more or less a test run and I was actually satisfied with the results. Here is how it looked after maybe 15-20 minutes of sanding.
The next steps will be:
1) finishing the dry-dex coat,
2) sanding out to reveal imperfections in shape,
3) fixing those imperfections with as little dry-dex as possible,
4) sanding once more until it is perfectly smooth,
5) applying primer
6) and sanding again (are you seeing a pattern here?)
Everything coming next appears to be a little bit easier, and I will not lie, the celluclay sanding really got the best of me at times and probably had more than just a little to do with why the progress essentially halted. Expect the next post to come sometime this weekend.
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