Denuo Novo The Lore: The Mandalorian Riddle Part 2

The team at Denuo Novo are giving us an insight into the choices, processes and every other element behind creating these screen accurate treasures, and they way they’re doing it is in The Lore, with this the second part of the series looking at the construction of the helmet of Din Djarin, the Mandalorian.

We left off at discussing what colors make up that incredible sheen. But that’s only half the story. The other half of the technique is a special paint gun we affectionately and loosely call our “Atomizer.”

The second portion of the riddle sounds like something that would be used to help bring Star Wars™ to life in our replica portfolio! While we wish we could be as cool as a long arm phase-pulse Amban™ sniper rifle, what we can say is it’s a special tool that atomizes the metal paint to the finest particulate as possible. As we found out early, our automotive paint guns were simply not applying the metallic paint as finely as we needed particulates to be. In essence, if the particles of paint were too big, the metal “sheen” is lost. The paint gun we had to turn to was not necessarily a HVLP automotive gun. Instead we needed the smallest needle size that could only be found in an airbrush format. When the pressures are dialed in the smaller diameter needle creates the particulates to create the correct metal sheen. If the particulates were any bigger, the sheen would be lost and the helmets would simply lose their luster and appear flat.

So let’s get to the last clue of the riddle: Matte. To capture a perfectly consistent “under mandible cheek” shadow at every angle, we turned to reference and videos of the original helmet, carefully studying high-res images provided by Lucasfilm™ archives and we achieved a painting trick that “forced” the shadow…the area under the cheek is intentionally spray matted then weathered! The simplicity of this trick is astonishing as it only requires a matte spray. Thus, when we recreated the replica helmets, we simply masked the ultra-glossy helmet, sprayed it with matte. The effect was a dampened reflectiveness and that permanent 5 o’clock shadow.

There you have it, riddle story has been told! I hope you’ve enjoyed this fun segment in explaining our paint process. Please do sign up for our newsletter to get more fun content and first shot chances at sales, inventory, and exclusive pieces.

This is the way!