Building a Space Marine Lantern

In Germany we celebrate Martin of Tours and him dividing his coat, as St. Martin including a procession. Children will attend it, carrying a lantern, singing Martin's song and depending on the region will receive a Weckmann or sweet pretzel.

Depending on the time you have on your hand and the age of your cihldren, you either buy a pre-made lantern or build one yourself with them at Kindergarten or School. As this year, my kids build theirs in school and kindergarten, and are old enough to carry their lanterns on their own, I didn't want to go empty handed and build one for myself.

But what should my lantern be? And after thinking about it for a while, I had the idea of building a Space Marine helmet.

I looked around the internet for an image of the old Mark VII helmet, loaded it into a vector program, simplified it and split it into multiple layers, so I would have a template for the card board outline and coloured tracing paper.

As I like the Imperial Fists, I went with yellow for the main colour, but you can build this with a lot of Space Marine chapters.

Printing on black card board isn't easy, especially if it is thicker, as it won't properly work within a printer. Therefore I suggest, printing out the template, and then redrawing the outlines with a ballpoint pen to trace the helmet onto the black card board. As the tracing paper is translucent, you can just put it over the template, draw the outline with a pen and then cut both out. I recommend a proper pair of scissors or fresh blade on your hobby knife for this.

The "tricky" part is the middle section that connects both sides. I used a 4-5" wide thick card board strip for this, folded the sides and glued it in between. It is important to go for a material, that is sturdy enough to provide stability to the lantern, especially if you want to place a small light inside on the bottom and not just have it hanging in there.

I closed the side with further connectors on the top, where I drilled in holes and added a handle with wire, that I could hook up to the lantern stick.

And a quick light test - it works!

But sharing is caring, here is the print pattern for your own Astartes Helmet Lantern! Have fun and enjoy!

PDF - Space Marine Lantern Pattern