The LEGO Star Wars design team explained how they balanced the lack of color in the 75328 Mandalorian helmet — and why it wasn't entirely silver.
LEGO's first Mandalorian helmet, the 75277 Boba Fett helmet, is richly colored and mixes sand green, dark green, dark red and yellow elements, while Ding Jalin's helmet is dull. That's because the helmets in the series are almost entirely silver, which presents a real challenge for the LEGO Star Wars design team: How do you express details with just one color?
The answer is to use multiple silver tones, as you can see in the finished 75328 Mandalorian helmet. While much of the production revolves around light gray and black, there are also some drum paints of silver and dark grey that help break the visual monotony of the Mandalorian helmet.
"We did a lot of research trying to figure out how best to achieve chiaroscuro," says Michael Lee Stockwell, design manager for LEGO Star Wars, "and the reflective surface is primarily characterized by the environment in which that surface is located, so we knew we had to try to restore that in some way during construction." We tried something different, like an asymmetrical shadow, and then decided what worked best. ”
"Then it's about finding out which places on the helmet have the highest, brightest, most reflective values, which are the darkest, darkest, darkest, and try to see if we can capture that by using different shades."
Since then, Michael says it's almost a matter of trial and error finding the right hues and color combinations. "Study the reference images and what you get, put the model in different lights and compare it. It's an iterative process and we've tried a lot differently. ”
"When you're using only one color, it can be difficult to create detail and depth. We've been doing this in multicolor models, but we don't think much about it when doing monochrome models. That's why we feel this is a complement to the model, not a derogation. ”
The highly reflective surface of the Mandalorian helmet was a luxury given to him by his Beskar armor – but the LEGO version could not provide this material, and it rarely used drum paint silver. However, a helmet that is entirely metallic may not only exceed budget, but also not meet the LEGO Group's quality standards.
"Lego is something we want people to use to recreate other objects, and we know that if you build two drum-shaped lacquer elements with studs repeatedly, you'll gradually wear off the paint," Michael explains, "and, we don't think it's the best quality performance." Therefore, in almost all cases, we limit ourselves to metallizing only components without studs, because in this way they can be reused without damaging their appearance. ”