-a helmet
-a net
-some paint (at least two different colors, obviously)
-a lot of safety pins
Before starting to paint the actual helmet, it's a good idea to practice with a helmet that is a similar color to your's so you have an idea on what to do. Also, trying to match the color of your gear is a good idea. As you can see, I tried all kinds of different things on this helmet. I used my old bike helmet with happened to be in the same Olive Drab shade as my helmet.
You can practice with pieces of paper or cardboard though if a spare helmet isn't available.
Once you figure out what colors look best with your gear and the environment you are playing in, then you can move onto your actual helmet.
The original color of my helmet was Olive Drab. I did one really thick coat of Rustoleum Khaki Camo paint as the base layer.
After drying overnight, I then bought this net from Target and put it on my helmet. This is the best net that I have found to use for this type of painting. Snowman, another member on this forum, had very good results with it also.
This is the net stretched over my helmet. I moved the slack to the very front and back of my helmet because it would be covered up by my NVG mount up front and by several strips of velcro in the back. You want the net to be AS TIGHT AS POSSIBLE! This step took about 30 minutes.
I stretched the net using a lot of safety pins as you can see in this photo. You can only see a fraction of all the safety pins used though.
After I was happy with how tight the net was on the helmet, I took it outside and painted a really thick coat of Rustoleum Green Camo paint. I wanted the major color to be green in order to blend in well in Oregon's forests.
After waiting about 30 minutes, I very very carefully took off the helmet cover, and this is what it looked like.
Picture of it near some gear.
I decided it was too green, so I did a light dusting of the Rustoleum Khaki Camo paint around the places where the net was not tight on the helmet, such as around the rim and the ear cups. This is what it looks like next to some gear after the dusting.
I decided it was a bit too light, so I did a very very light dusting of the Green paint over some of the tan parts to darken it up. This is my final helmet with everything attached as of right now.
Hope this is useful for you guys. Maybe Matt will move this into the articles section like I asked. I don't think he took me seriously when I said I was going to write this tutorial.
