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Tim Hammond supplied me with a blank white Simpson Bandit lots of stills from Grand Theft Auto games San Andreas and Vice City and asked me to do what I could with it. I'd not done a helmet quite like this before but after sifting through all the reference material I put together a scheme which seemed to wrap round the helmet nicely.

Blending together 8 scenes from the games took a while to get done but eventually it started to come together. First of all I freehand airbrushed the background colours and then built up the basic shapes of the buildings, trees, signs, vehicles and figures by cutting out silhouette masks and airbrushing them on.

The next stage was to handpaint the fine detail on. It worked so well because the graphics in the stills had a bit of an airbrushed feel about them anyway so that feel transferred itself across nicely to the end artwork.

The final part of the design was to mask and airbrush the logo from each game onto the sides of the helmet. The boldness of the white lettering with black edging gives a really nice contrast against the finely rendered images behind.

The helmet was then given several coats of clear and then highly polished by Steve Edwards before the completed item was given back to Tim. Thanks to Tim for sending me photos of the helmet complete with a new darkened visor which really finished it off nicely.

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