Amphibia Costumes - Anne's Hair - Part 12
Alright, Anne's hair piece was in a good place for the foam and LEDs. Which meant it was time for the last part of the piece, the wig hair. I had originally purchased this one (
link), but we didn't like the tint of blue. It looked a little too greenish. I also bought this one (
link) for the curls (because as we learned Anne has curls), but it wasn't going to be easy to work with for our purpose. At least the curly wig wasn't all for naught though. We ended up deciding that if G needs a break from the LED hair piece we can just throw on the other wig and the costume will still look complete. The wrong color wig was useful as well because I ended up using it for practice (of which there was a lot of). But ultimately we ended up with this blue wig (
link) as the right choice.
So I didn't take a ton of pictures during the practice phase, but easy to say it was pretty frustrating. As a reminder, I was using that Goku youtube video as a basis for this project, but without any audio and it traveling at 3x speed it was hard to fully determine what he was doing. Especially for someone who has never done anything like this before. But after slowing the video down to 1/4 speed, I was able to learn a few things. He appears to be using a glue, and the liquid that he dips his hands into is likely soapy water to remove the glue residue because he immediately wipes his hands off. Thus not relevant to making the wig hair stick. He also appears to be using a hot glue gun for making the initial bond between the wig hair and the foam. So I had some things to work with.
I didn't have a mannequin head, so I had to improvise. I used the hockey stick coat rack I've been using to hang my Dremel off of. I attached a rubber play ball that was roughly the size of a head to the top using Gorilla tape in all four directions. Then I placed the wig over it to create my own make shift mannequin.
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I tried a few different sequence of events for the process. I used G's Johnson and Johnson detangler (which was very needed for the practice wig). Lucky to have a kiddo with long hair and already learning which detangler is better than the rest. I learned that you really need to not touch the wig as much as possible. These wigs are cheap, and every brush seems to straighten and tangle it equally. So less touching was always better.
The Goku video cuts the hair close to the scalp to make his small pieces of hair. I tried that method, and I also tried two others. I tried cutting the hair from the bottom at a certain desired length, and then I also tried removing the hair in wefts from the actual sewn piece. The wefts were handy in that the hair was attached to something else and moved less, but ultimately the look was way off. Cutting the hair from the top like the Goku video was good, but left me with uneven pieces that were harder to work with down below. I ultimately found cutting from the bottom at desired lengths and working my way up was the best method.
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After getting a chunk of hair, cutting it using my special fabric scissors (a must), I would continue to hold that piece in my left hand. I tried to leave a tip of about 1/4 to 1/2 inch above my fingers. I'd then immediately dip my right fingers into MOD PODGE Matte to seal the tip together.
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After sealing the tip, I would lean the edge of the tip off of a cardboard box having not yet moved any fingers on my left hand since cutting. And then open my left hand fingers as the hair laid on the cardboard box. I learned the less movement and touching the better. Then I'd rest my left hand over the hair above the glued tip line, and fix the tips with my right hand. The left hand holding the hair down was essential to not having the hair move on you while fixing it with the right hand. Once I got the tip in a good place, then I'd dip my hands in soapy water, remove the glue, and then dry them off. Now I'd start the whole process again with a new chunk of hair. I tried to make a variety of lengths, widths, and densities.
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Once I had made a variety of hair pieces, then I could move to affixing them to the foam itself. The tough part of my hair piece is that I've got a lot of other things going on compared to the Goku wig. Additionally, I wanted to make my job easier by using gravity. In Goku's wig, he affixes all of the hairs at the base of the spike, then he forms them into a spike and uses a hair tie. But my forms aren't spikes and I don't think they'd come to a tip so easily. So I couldn't use that method. For that reason, I felt using gravity was a must. But I also can't lay my piece down on the table because it has pieces that'll get damaged. So I came up with a method that would allow the piece to hang off the edge of the table without damaging the sticks/leaves.
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I put the hair piece into a long pole, and then placed a dumbbell on the other side. That way the pole couldn't raise up as long as the downward force of the hairpiece didn't exceed the weight of the dumbbell.
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The system worked well outside of some spinning every once in a while. Now that we had that issue settled it was time to work through how to actually afix the wig hair strips to the foam hairpiece.
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