hello! i really love your cosplays and im not sure if this is the place to ask (ive checked your gumroad and kofi if i missed it im so sorry!), but do you have any advice or tutorials out for wigs?
specifically!! i really adore how fluffy you make them, and the layers are perfect! do you achieve it all with just heat styling and hair spray? :o
it tis indeed the right place to ask! So I dont have any traditional wig tutorials out, but I have done one on houseki wigs:
I realized I never talked about how I made my houseki wigs here!! So here’s the brief run-down, the gist is:
1) style your wig and harden i
and I believe i also included a fairly in depth section on wigs in my Karna tutorial.
But! in terms of general advice, personally I find that a lot of wig smithing is applying a core 2-3 concepts in different ways. The bread and butter is heat training, back combing, and adding dimensionality.
Heat training involves heating the fibers such that they will lock in whatever place they were in when heat was applied. A common application of this is if you want a huge up-do, you flip your wig upside down and hit it with heat, so the fibers will stay bent in the upwards direction. I often do this first and foremost on my wigs to make them get more lift and fluff! (for a casual wig, i dont blast it as strongly/as many times, but for crazier ones like karna it was heat trained heavily). This can also be useful to bake in hair parts, swooshes, and spikes.
Then theres back combing, with is often combined with heat training and is a primary method for adding structure in wigs. even for big fluffy wigs, most often the strategic move isnt to keep adding more and more hair- but rather to make whatever hair is already on the wig simply occupy more volume. This can be done by isolating some of the innermost hair close to the roots/wherever you want volume and taking a toothed comb and running it backwards to bunch of the fibers (and then ideally hit it with heat to lock the bunches in place!) once its been bunched, you can brush it out again and notice that it will have retained a lot of its frizz, and is much more voluminous! this makes a little hair pillow for your fibers that is also MUCH easier to shape by hand. I often do this around the bangs of my wigs or anywhere if i feel like i need to add more volume/define a shape better. its also great to do for the inside of huge spikes, pony/pigtails, and super fluffy bangs. Another popular technique to do this is to use a crimping iron, since the crimping iron will press in texture to the fibers in one go, thus making them take up more volume (although to be honest i have not had a ton of luck with this technique myself but its much faster).
and then dimensionality, this is basically my code for ""shading"" your wig. everytime i fully finish the fluffing/styling of a wig, i then go over it with some kind of color pigment like eyeshadow, an airbrush, or markers to give the wig extra pop. i often add these pigments in the ridges along spikes/parts to make the shapes stand out, or add a darker color along the roots to make it look more natural. this process makes the work you've done stand out and overall looks very professional!
since reading this in text only goes so far, arda wigs has a ton of incredibly helpful tutorials/wig styling examples on their youtube:
50+ Styles, 80+ Blended Colors, Realistic Heat Resistant Wigs. Carrying high end brands for beauty, fx, cosplay and drag!
Sarah Spaceman also has a fantastic cosplay education channel has a great wig introduction video that goes over the foundations and techniques too!
