For this project, we had to make a sculpture that was both aesthetically pleasing and functional in relation to the body. I wanted to make a space helmet. My space helmet would also have an audio portion to it, and would be able to play music or sounds through headphones in the helmet itself.

I first began by searching for some inspiration pics to help generate ideas for my own space helmet.

alien helmet design 1 – janiklind on deviantart.com

Black Helmets – Donnie Luu

My first step was to construct what the user wears on their head. It had to be flexible yet pretty sturdy, as well as be able to hold the headphones to use for the audio portion. I decided to use thin scrap cardboard from a box of applesauce, reinforcing it with duct tape.

I wanted to make shoulder pieces for my helmet, so I took cardboard and made several pentagons. I then taped and hot glued these together to make the base. I eventually decided to cover them with paper mache made out of toilet paper, it order to give it a uniform look. These pieces were later spray painted with a matte black.

Here is a picture of the helmet and mask together, in order to give an idea of how they would eventually attach. I made helmet out of pieces of cardboard cut into equilateral triangles, then covered in crisscrossed strips of duct tape. For the eyes I used plastic sunglasses I had recently received after getting my eyes dilated. The entire piece was later spray painted black.

Because I wanted the experience of wearing the hood to be as dark and enclosed as possible, I decided on using a hood to cover up any places where light could shine in. My mother and her sewing abilities were a huuuge help here. She used spare material that was lying around in my garage.

This is the end product. Halfway through the construction, I realized that it was developing a medieval look. This was unexpected but I liked it, so I went with it. By the end, I had a black space knight helmet that could play space music!