I bought my first Stormtrooper helmet in 2014. I did not buy it to draw on. I bought it because I had been a Star Wars fan for as long as I could remember, my studio was already full of cultural objects worth keeping (early Lego sets, original Star wars figures I'd collected as a student, the kind of pieces a designer-collector accumulates), and the helmet seemed like a thing that belonged in the room.
For the first few years, that is exactly what it was. A shelf ornament. Then it became a dressing-up prop for my children. After that, it spent some time as an unconventional light cover in my son's bedroom, which was, of course, Star Wars themed.
It might have stayed that way. What changed was lockdown.
What lockdown did to artists
The word "lockdown" has done a lot of work since 2020 and most of it is exhausting. From the studio's point of view, though, it produced something that is now well documented. A creative window. Without the day-to-day pressure of client work, exhibitions, deadlines and the demand to perform a job, plenty of the artists I know look back on those months as the moment something shifted. People made things they would not have made otherwise. Whole bodies of work began in that window. I include myself.
For me, it began with skateboards and a Sharpie.
A skateboard deck has a perfect surface for a Sharpie. Smooth, gloss, hard, the kind of finish that takes ink without absorbing it. When I started "doodling" on decks, the pen moved differently than it does on paper. There is a kinaesthetic element to it, that was satisfying in itself. I enjoyed the flow. That led, almost inevitably, to wondering what other surfaces would produce that same feel.
The helmet had been n my life for the better part of seven years. It was the obvious next test.
The first marker
A while before any of the proper drawings happened, I made an exploratory pass on the helmet with a dry white marker. There is an image of it in my photo library, the lines tentative, plotting where the work might go. I was not committing yet. I was trying to see whether the same kinaesthetic feel I had with the Sharpie on a skateboard would translate to a curved, three-dimensional, instantly recognisable cultural object.
It did.
In March 2022, the first finished helmet started to take shape. The piece that has become my signature has an AT-AT walking across the brow, a detail I have repeated, with variations, on most of the helmets that have followed. I do not put the AT-AT on every one, but it is a personal favourite as Empire Strikes Back is the best movie IMHO. A Star Wars motif tucked into a Star Wars surface, layered.
The art-world context
This was not new ground. I want to be honest about that.
The 1976 Stormtrooper helmet, the Andrew Ainsworth original sculpted for the production of Star Wars: A New Hope, has a long history of being used as a canvas. In 2013, the curator Ben Moore launched Art Wars at the Saatchi Gallery, a project that placed Ainsworth's original helmets in the hands of artists including Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, David Bailey, Mr Brainwash, D*Face and Ben Eine. The project was a tribute and a fundraiser, and it pulled the helmet firmly into the contemporary art conversation. Something that I took note of.
The French artist AUGUSTE has been working in the same lineage. Others have followed. When I started, I was aware of all of it. The helmet was already a shared canvas, in the way the Lambretta scooter was for the British mod movement.
What I was offering was not a new idea. It was a new line. My line work, my detail set, my way of letting the curves of the helmet dictate where the drawing goes.
The pen and the surface
The Stormtrooper helmet is a beautiful object to draw on. It moves between dome sections and deep angles. It has the intricate small details under the eyebrow lips, the speaker grilles either side of the chin, the line where the back of the helmet folds towards the done. Every shift in surface forces the pen to do something slightly different, and that is what makes the design flow.
A flat illustration on paper has its rhythms but they are mostly about composition. A drawing on a curved object is a conversation between the pen, the surface and the silhouette of the object itself. You do not draw the same line on a helmet that you would draw on a board.
Five years on from the first marker test, I have produced somewhere between twelve and thirteen Stormtrooper helmets, all in my own line work, all signed and one-of-one. Each has a particular subject driving it. Sometimes Star Wars. Sometimes broader culture. Sometimes a brand collaboration. Sometimes a private commission for a collector. The helmet is the canvas now. What changes is who it is for and what story it tells.
A gift for the Star Wars collector
If you are looking to commission something for a Star Wars-obsessed husband/wife, brother, dad or friend, a helmet is the move that the obvious gift cannot match. A poster, a model, a Lego set, all good. A one-of-one Stormtrooper helmet, hand-drawn over weeks, signed by the artist, with a story in every section of the surface, is the gift that gets cased and lit. It also tends to be the gift that comes up in conversation more than once a year.
Where it goes from here
The helmet series is a working canvas. I will keep producing them, in line with private commissions and brand collaborations, and the Genesis piece, the first AT-AT-browed helmet from March 2022, will always sit in the studio as the moment the series started.
If you want one of your own, with your own subject driving the line work, I take a handful of helmet commissions a year. Enquire about a commission.
Rick, aka Mr Dogtooth