What Are the Best Pens for Autographed Helmets?

Choosing the right pen can make a huge difference in how an autographed helmet turns out.

In this episode, we break down our favorite pens for mini and full-size helmets, including Sharpie, Pentel N50, DecoColor, POSCA, and Molotow.

We’ll discuss which pens work best for black, silver, gold, white, and specialty colors, plus how the size of the autograph, inscriptions, helmet design, and future autographs should affect your choice.

If you’re getting a helmet signed, this episode will help you pick the right pen before the athlete ever puts ink to it.

https://powerssportsmemorabilia.com/

Transcript

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Alright, welcome back to another episode of the Power Sports Memabilia Show. I'm your host, Matt Powers. Thank you again for joining me. Don't forget to visit the website powersportsmemabilia.com. Also give us a follow up there on Instagram at Powers Autographs. Well, continuing with our series about the best pens to use on your autographed items. We've done trading cards, and that was a very popular one. Lots of varying opinions on that one. And today we're going to be moving on to helmets. And helmets, we've obviously got two different choices. We've got mini helmets and then we've got full-sized helmets. So let's just tackle the easy one right out the gate, and then we'll move on to the full-size helmets. So the mini helmets are pretty straightforward. If you want to use a black color, a black sharpie works just fine. If you want a blue color, blue sharpie works perfect. I would stick away from the paint pens as much as possible if you don't need to. Now, if you are doing a Steelers helmet and you want to do white or you want to do yellow, then of course a paint pen is your best choice there. I typically like to use Sharpies whenever we can, just because it's a very small space design. And especially if you're getting an inscription, we've got a couple customers that like to get multiple inscriptions on mini helmets. I know crazy as it sounds, but that gets kind of rather challenging to fit it all into a mini helmet. Then of course, you've got some mini helmets with big logos on there and some without logos. So you take the Raiders, for example, versus the Cleveland Browns. So it really just depends on the item that you're getting signed, but Sharpies are the best way to go. If you want to do silver, you can do a silver Sharpie. They don't actually look too terrible on mini helmets, assuming it's you know flowing good and looks good. But obviously, you can use a deco fine paint pen if you do need silver. Those look really good. If you want gold, a deco fine gold looks good. If you want kind of the oddball colors like the whites and the yellows, we love Postcas. Postca has a pen that's a little bit finer than a Deco Fine, but it's not an extra fine. So it's kind of like in that tweener one. And we just did one for Lin Swan with three inscriptions on there, and it came out so legible. It was just fantastic. Now, granted, Lin's got great handwriting and a great autograph, so it made it easy, but it's just a little bit thinner of a pen than a fine. It looks very sharp on many helmets, very sharp. So um it's not uh I forget what postca size it is. It's like the five, I think they call it or so, something like that. But it's a really sharp one. We use it on cards too. Uh very, very good looking pen. You can use Molotil if you want to. It's a little bit thicker of a tip, uh, but it's got good colors for whites and yellows as well. So, but if you do want to stick with the black, uh black sharpie looks good. You can also do the N50 Pentel pen. Those look really great. Um, but Sharpies are pretty the basic way to go with mini helmets. Uh all right, moving on to full-sized helmets. Now keep in mind this is not going to be a blanket statement here. As mentioned before, every helmet has a different size logo on there. So it kind of limits the amount of space that you have on there. Some helmets are the speed helmets, so they've got those holes on the top, and again, that cuts away from the uh size that you can uh place your autograph on. So they've got limited space. So it seems like they make these things smaller and smaller. It's like they don't want to have you get any autographs at all. They just make these things so small to get signed on a full-size helmet. So, given that information though, let's kind of walk through kind of your your pen choices here and kind of what I like to do. Alright, so if the helmet is going to be a black autograph, the only pen that I use is the black Pentel N50. This thing is golden, it's like streak proof for whatever reason. It's a Japanese pen, and so you know how the Japanese make their pens. They make them really, really good. And so this is one that you definitely want to have in your arsenal. So if you're using black, I would use this. It's a bold black, and uh it's like I said, it seems to be streakproof. I don't know, it's just an awesome pen. The ink is just constantly on the tip, so um it just works really, really well. I would not use a deco black, I've never seen that turn out good. It's like one of my least favorite colors that deco does. I don't know why it looks like junk. It's just not for me. So only use that N50. Uh silver, again, deco silver works good. Sometimes it's kind of weird. I and I haven't I don't know the science behind this, so don't ask me. But sometimes silver spiders out. So you see the ink go on there, and then the ink will kind of spider out like a spider web a little bit. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. I have no idea why it does. So just something to keep in mind. Most of the time, silver decos turn out really well. Every once in a while we'll get a little spider, but I guess it's just like the spider in your house, you know. You get you don't see spiders for a while and then they come back. So maybe they come out during spider season, I don't know. But you can use a silver sharpie on a helmet. It looks just fine. Just make sure that it's flowing good before you use it, that it's not a dead sharpie. Uh, and they usually, once you get one flowing, they usually look pretty, pretty darn good. So uh gold, again, you can use a deco on there. The size of the pen, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Okay, if you've got a huge space for an autograph, you can use a broad. It's a little bit thicker of a pen, obviously, but the fine sizes work just fine. No pun intended. Um, but I it depends how legible you want the autograph, who's signing it, how thick their autograph is, how fast they go. But if you just stick with the fine, you'll be fine. Uh pun intended there. So um uh moving on to different colors. If you want the greens and stuff like that, Molotone makes a really sharp green. Uh, if you need a red, Molotone makes a really nice traffic red. We use those for the Chiefs. That's a really good one. Um again, Postca makes great pens too. Uh, purples look really good with deckos and poskas and and molotes too. So purple is one of those colors that kind of looks really good across all uh all pens. They do um they do vary a little bit in color, so just kind of make sure you pick one that kind of color matches whatever purple you're looking to do. Um but you can do like a molotov, there's a four millimeter, that's kind of their quote unquote broad. That looks really sharp on helmets. Uh, and then they've also got like a two millimeter. I probably wouldn't use that on a helmet unless it was like a small space where you're getting multiple autographs on there. But if you're just getting one guy on there, I would do the four millimeter molot for you want if you want special colors like the reds, uh, pinks, uh, greens, kind of you know, funky colors like that. Work really, really well. But again, it just really depends on that logo and how many other autographs you're planning on adding onto this thing. Um, and going back to the Sharpies, too, you can't you can use a black sharpie, you can use a blue sharpie, that's fine. We have a bunch of Hall of Fame helmets that we're working on, so those full-size helmets with the Hall of Fame logos, and they're getting trying to get as many Hall of Famers on there as possible. So obviously, you don't want to use a broad pen for that. So you got to kind of ask yourself, hey, what's the ultimate goal for this helmet? If the ultimate goal is to add a bunch of autographs, doing a thin sharpie works just fine. Okay, the autographs will be nice and legible, they won't take up too much space. You can add a whole bunch of autographs on there. And if you did like a fine paint pen, that would be a little bit too thick, in my opinion. So you want to want to make sure that you kind of know what your end game is for this helmet. Are we adding more autographs to it, or are we just sticking with this one? So that'll really help uh help you pick the pen. Hey, also, are you adding inscriptions and stuff like that? So um, those are pretty much the only pens that we kind of use for the helmets. You know, we use basically black, we use the N50, uh, we use Deco Silver for the most part, and then uh outside of that, every other color we use either Moloto or Postca for. Poska is a really great pen. I've talked about that on the cards already. We've really kind of switched a lot over to it. It's just a really clean, crisp pen. We like the way the colors look, they're really vibrant. Moloto's got some great ones too. Um, but again, it's just sometimes the tips are a little bit different, and the molotes are a little bit thinner, and I think they look kind of really good on cards. Whereas Molotow is is great, don't get me wrong, we used it a lot. It's just a little bit thicker, so again, it just depends on who the athlete is. But always test your pens beforehand, you know, make sure you kind of draw it out there a little bit and say, okay, how thick is this? Is this gonna fit with what I'm looking to do? Um, but again, the helmets, like there's there there is really no absolute wrong answer. Most of the time, you're gonna be just fine with whatever color and whatever pen you choose, for the most part. So, but just follow some of these guidelines here, and this should hopefully help you with uh your full-sized helmet autographs. Okay, we'll continue the series uh this week until we kind of get through all the items, and hopefully you guys can bookmark this and refer back to this whenever you have questions on pen colors and pen types. If you do go to our website, uh under the drop-down menu, there is a pen guide there. So you can kind of click on that and that can kind of um uh help guide you, pun intended, there, uh, on your pen choices with all the other items. I think a customer had emailed us asking for that uh hard copy and he laminated it up. So uh if that's something you need to uh want us to do for you, go ahead and email us and we'll send it on over to you. So anyway, don't forget to visit the website powersportsmobility.com and also give us a follow over there on Instagram at powers autographs, and we will see you on the next episode.