Motorcycle half helmets and custom painting them for fun and clean please check the tech sheet for the type of surfaces it’s
profit is the subject of this article, I hope you find it helpful. Half recommended for. The final step and it’s very important don’t
helmets with T Shirt type designs airbrushed on them is what forget is to blow the helmet off with clean air forcing any water,
I’m referring to with the term novelty helmets. Weather the hel- prep cleaner out of the trim or around visor snaps, rivets. You
met you will be working on is DOT certified or not preparing the do not want this coming out of its hiding place during the paint-
helmet for airbrushing is the same. Clean the outer surface of ing or clear coating process chances are good it will ruin your
the helmet with warm water and soap or one of the paint manu-
work up to that point.
factures prep cleaning solutions. If you use manufactures prep
On some half helmets the bottom trim can be removed very easily on others it may not
be worth the hassle in which case you’ll want to mask off that trim. When masking off
trim on motorcycle helmets I find it easier to use blue fine line tape on the upper most
part of the trim, where the trim meets the helmet. Use a good grade masking tape to
mask from the fine line tape down to cover the entire piece of trim. Using the fine line
tape on the trim first ensures you will end up with a nice clean line all the way around
the helmet.
With the trim taken care of next step is to scuff the entire helmet surface with a
medium Scotch Brite pad, this will provide you with a surface the paint will adhere to.
Wash the surface off as before and blow air over the surface to ensure no water, prep
solution remains behind.
For this design I’ve chosen a skull, barb wire design that over sold by an airbrush retailer as I’m doing or make your own. The
the years has made me a lot of money; hopefully you can adapt design is just a pile of skulls that cover the helmet with barb wire
it to your painting style and it will do the same for you. As a circling the helmet. I want the barb wire to appear to be under
novelty helmet design it should be fast and easy to accomplish. this skull but over all the other skulls so placing this skull is the
First using base white we’ll center our first skull in the front of first step. Just shade the skull in with a bit of white; I will not be
the helmet. For a skull template you can use one of the ones adding a lower jaw to most of these.
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