Wow, what a wild ride 2018 turned out to be. Most of the plans went out the window due to life getting in the way, but I was still able to make a ton of progress. Here’s the abbreviated version of that journey, with more details to add later.

I received a ton of positive feedback from people, and was blown away by the kindness and encouragement. Seeing the artisans on people’s boards has been almost a surreal experience. Also some people asked about giveaways for meetups, so I made a few like the Houston meetup, and a frosted glass/amber beer inspired colorway:

In another giveaway, I made a blackout style where the helmet glows and the visor is dark, which made for some pretty cool effects:

And there were some setbacks, but some fun discoveries. For example, water and humidity can contaminate curing resin, but it can make some pretty cool effects. This was 100% accidental, but check out the smokey effect:

Some people did want to see triple shots or more details, and I wanted to refine the sculpt more. So that’s exactly what happened! I beefed up the oxygen tube to hold color better, polished the visor, and refined the base. The first cast looked promising:

So then it’s color experimentation time! Triple shots, and tiger stripes:

And this is where a lot of frustration came in. I’m not 100% happy with that Carbon Orange. Same goes for Nautilus Yellow. For some reason, those colors are acting a fool for the oxygen tube, but there wasn’t an issue with Ammonite. Go figure.

So what’s the lesson here? Sometimes a color match requires a slightly different approach depending on the size and color background. For example, dark background and light details is tough, but darker details on a lighter base is easier.

So without further ado, here are the colorways for Mach 2.

Black/red:

Godspeed:

GMK Terminal:

and GMK Laser:

So here we are! The journey to Mach 2 has taken way longer than originally planned, lots of trial and error, but a really cool final output. As a bonus, just the other day I mis-clicked on a color in the RGB keyboard profile (it was too dim and the wrong color), and found out you can combine visor colors! Here’s an example… two GMK Laser helmets, the left one is with a pink LED, and the other is a lower brightness deep blue. The effect becomes a blend into a sunset vibe, which just happens to go beautifully with the teal in GMK laser:

So hopefully you  win one, and then you can experiment to make your very own corona effects!