Mastering Extreme Wig Styling - 1 Hour Cosplay Panel - Wefts, Spikes, Foamwork, & More!

Hi guys this is regan of cowboy crunchies cosplay and today i'm going to present the art of extreme wig styling. This is actually one of my favorite panels to give i've, given it a couple times, including at last year's mcm london over the summer. It'S really one of my favorites to give and for anyone who either wants a refresher or didn't get to make it to the panel. This is going to be my online version. Usually, what i like to do is go over the techniques that i personally use in all of my extreme wigs, and one thing i want to cover before we really get started is well what is an extreme wig there's a lot of ways to describe that and, Honestly, any kind of cosplay wig is a little extreme in my opinion, but what i refer to by extreme is something that is really larger than life. You know something that cannot be achieved with someone's own hair or without an extreme amount of understructure or styling product. Last year, i actually came out with a book on extreme wig. Styling uh, ironically, called the art of extreme wig styling, and in here this is where i cover these general techniques, because, to be honest, there's lots and lots of ways you can apply these. But for me i generally use two - maybe three, really big techniques for all of my wigs and those techniques that i really love are wefting teasing as well as foam work, that's a little much to cover in an hour, but we're going to go as fast as Possible and hopefully show you guys the ropes on how to make your own extreme wigs so before we get started. One thing to bear in mind is that this wig is made up of a mesh cap with a number of hair fiber wefts sewn in. If you actually flip your wig inside out and you look closely at the inside, you can actually see all of these little rows of fiber right here. Those look like this. If you were to actually take it out of the wig and the more of these you have in the wig, the thicker, your hair is going to become just because the more actual fiber is going to be sewn into your wig netting. So this is an important thing to bear in mind for a couple of reasons. First of all, the more of these we have the thicker, the wig is, which is really important for extreme styles, that need more hair than a person has on their head. You can also add more of these wefts into your wig and then suddenly you've got a double thick wig. There'S a couple ways to get that hair one way is to just buy extra packs of wefts from certain dealers. I know arta wigs epic cosplay. A lot of these dealers um sell matching wefts that will match your exact wig, but they come in long long packages. That is definitely one way to do it. If you are not able to do that, or maybe you bought your wig from a seller who does not sell wefts, you can actually harvest these out. So, for instance, this came out of this wig. You can kind of see where i've cut it out right here, but it's really easy to take these out of your wig, although a little bit time consuming. Essentially, these are sewn onto our wig by the factory and we can just as easily pop them right off and then sew them back onto them ourselves when you are de-wefting a wig there's two places where the weftline is sewn, underneath the hair itself is actually sewn Onto this little strip of fabric, don't don't do that don't take that out, because otherwise your hair is just going to fall right out and that's not useful for you. What you instead want to seam rip is where the weft right here is actually sewn onto our elastic or sewn onto our netting. Once we pop that little seam, i'm gon na, do one a little bit low in the back once we pop that out. Suddenly it's not attached anymore and then we can remove our weft from the wig and if you are really really devoted, you can de-weft an entire wig that way and then sew it into a different base. Wig and then suddenly, you have a double thick wig, which is really really good for styling. It'S a lot of work. It'S not my favorite thing to do, but it is certainly a way to immediately increase the volume in your wig. You can also make sure that you purchase your wig from somewhere that has very thick wigs to start with, so, for instance, this is. This is an epic cosplay wig. It has not been double wefted at all. It just came this thick, it's a really! It'S almost! It'S almost unmanageably thick, actually so, depending on your style, this may not be the wig for you um, but for short styles that i want to say spike or tees into big shapes. I really like this. I really like arda anything. That'S a very thick easy to work with. Wig is what you want to start with. If you could not purchase a a very thick wig like that, you can always create your own very thick wig with that wefting method. So for teasing and i'll probably put in a couple examples uh over over my voice here for teasing, what we're really talking about is creating a large shape made out of just hair uh with extreme wigs a lot of times. Oh well, really, almost all the time. I will have something in my wig called an under structure, and that is the thing that is going to make the shape larger than life like. If we look at these example, wigs there's no way that that is a person's hair and honestly, there's there's no way that that's even the wig itself like if we look here at this wig. This is actually my uh, my wig, that i often tease during panels and so she's, not looking that great we've got a little bit of tease going on here. But if we look at the portion, that has not been teased and if i say well, i'm going to make a spike out of this - and i just hold it out like this into my spike. That doesn't look that great, because the hair is being compressed down and we've ended up with a really thin stringy. Looking spike that that's not what i like to see in my wigs and yeah, we could do this and i could spray a bunch of hairspray or got to be on it and make it stay. But at the end of the day, this is not the larger than life really thick, fluffy spike that i want, i could add in another wig's worth of hair, fiber or three or four or five, but at a point that's going to become really really heavy and Unmanageable, so that's also not what i want to do. What i instead want to do is create an understructure. That'S going to fluff this hair out kind of form, um a surface or a more solid thing for it to grasp onto, and that way i'm going to have a nice big, fluffy spike. That does not weigh a lot at all and for the understructure that i'm talking about for this particular styling technique. It'S going to be made out of hair. You can make an understructure out of anything with foam work. Obviously it's made out of foam or something else hard like that, but for teasing the tease is in fact the under structure when we tease up the hair, we're creating a very kinked texture and because the hair is all is all jagged and kinked like that, and No longer straight, it no longer really lays flat against itself the way that this does. This is nice and silky and smooth and, as a result, it compresses down way more than we want it to, but instead this texturized hair there's a lot of air space. In here and the hair is pushing against itself and as a result, when i try and push it, it doesn't want to stay like that, like i can like do that and compress it that way, but that's not how it naturally wants to go. It naturally wants to be like this, and so this is the structure that we really want, our spike to be made out of and for large spikes. I actually also like to lay smooth hair on top the bigger the spike. The more you need to texturize the hair, and at a point i personally don't love the look of super teased up hair. I think for medium sized spikes, it's totally fine, but for large ones. I i like to actually hide the understructure completely and i'll show you guys how to do that in a minute. This is a tease that i put in earlier and have brushed out, and one thing to note is well: if you brushed it out, why is it staying like that? Why is it not returned to this this flat, silky kind of look um, and the answer is that wigs are plastic and like other kinds of plastics like thermoplastics, like warbler, that you can heat up and they become soft and malleable, you can bend them into new And cool shapes and when they cool they're going to stay in that shape. That'S what happens here, and this is why our primary source of styling is not actually going to be the glue and the hairspray that we're putting in, because this is going to fall out over time. Some are more permanent than others with foam work. I i use a permanent glue so that it does not fall out, but if we're talking spiking and teasing you're not going to want to use a permanent glue like white pva glue, you want to use. Hairspray got to be that kind of stuff, and this is not permanent on a hot day or after walking around the con for a while or if you fall down, this is going to lose its hold a little bit, so this should not be your primary hold. If you go to try and do a spike, and if you let it go and it falls down, this is probably not going to be enough to last you through the day. Instead, your primary source of hold is going to be heat. That can be a blow dryer like this. I actually really like using a a good flat iron if you want to get the hair really really hot, so like if you're doing like ringlets or a big big big tease like this, the hotter you get it the more malleable and soft your hair is going To become, as a note, don't use a heat gun. That'S too much heat. These wigs are heat resistant, they're good up to 400 fahrenheit. I believe, but beyond that you are going to fry the wig. So don't go over that and also double check to make sure your wig is heat resistant, there's a couple more realistic or kanekalon wigs that are not, and for those you, you might slag the plastic if you heat it up a little too much so just double Check before you get started um, but after i have heated up the hair, i've formed it into the new texture and then i let it cool. Even after i brush it out that texture is still here, because that's the new texture and the direction that the plastic remembers being in, so this is a great way to permanently introduce volume, texture some strength that we'll i'll show you in just a second. This is a hold that is probably going to stay up for much much longer than this. If you have a good physical hold, you can use this as kind of the tail end to tweak your styling a little bit and make it a little slicker. But this is going to be what is going to keep your wig intact for much much longer, so always add a physical hold of some kind to your styling and for teasing for a big tease like this. What i like to do is separate out a little bit of the hair. Like i said, i texture is good, but too much texture can be a little distracting. I think um, and so, if i'm doing a really big big spike, that i know is going to need a lot of the texture to have that level of strength and largeness that i need it's going to be too much. And so my intention is that i eventually want to cover it with unteased, hair and so i'll end up with a large teeth spike that has smooth hair on the outside. I really like doing that with big shapes with smaller ones like if you have a a wig, maybe maybe something that's spiked all over your spikes, don't necessarily need to be as large. So i don't think you need to do this, but for big ones. I think it's quite helpful. I usually will tease the wig three times, maybe even more. If i need more texture, the nice thing about this is, if you try it, and you say, oh god, it's not teased nearly enough, it doesn't look right. That'S fine! Just do it again, that's why i think this method is pretty beginner friendly. This is already standing up pretty well on its own, but let's see if we can make it a little bit better so with teasing, i will use a teasing brush like this. This is my favorite thing to use, there's also teasing combs and i will use those as well. Actually i used to just use the teasing comb, but the reason i've added this on is because i think that it grips the hair a lot more. There'S a there's. A lot more to grip here than just a comb, and the other nice thing about this is the brush is so dense that it actually won't go very far down to the hair. So it's great for smoothing out the hair, because you will over tease it. That'S just the way it is so if you over, tease it and you're like, oh god, i don't like how it looks. Can i fix it? Yes, you can. You can just brush a little bit on the top and it'll unkink and untease that hair a little bit, but it's so dense. It'S not going to get really far into the meat of your tees where all of the strength and the hold is so it'll. Leave that alone now, if you do need to get down into the center area, that's where a teasing comb really comes into play, because that you can push the comb in there like. If this was my teasing comb, i can actually get way down in there into the t's. I usually try and tease from the base, and then i also try and tease the center first, because if i need to suddenly get to the center it's hard with this one, you can get in there with a teasing comb. But i think it'll make your life a little bit easier if you start from the bottom and move your way up and out so for teasing again, i will usually do this three or more times and that's because, with each pass of the tease, we're going to Increase the volume and the texture of the hair, some people will actually heat up the hair first and i think for teasing. That'S totally fine, the softer it is the more the more you can affect the hair itself. So i've seen folks who heat it up first or they put a flat iron in it first and then tease it totally fine. I actually tend to do it the opposite way, if i'm first starting out i'll, sometimes heat it, but especially later on. I feel like i get a little bit more control this way, the the the takeaway from that, though, is it really doesn't matter what you start with? You can use extreme hair, styling methods with any wigs any products, there's no right or wrong way to make a wig. This is just kind of what i like to do and my take is you know no right or wrong way, but a lot of times. There is a way to make your life easier for yourself, so i think, starting with a good cut of wig, starting with a thick wig, something like that yeah. I could make this work if i have a really a really thin wig that i found in a garage but you're, probably going to spend a lot more time, double wefting and teasing and adding to that wig than if you had started with something like this. So so for teasing, this spike we've already kind of gone through our first pass and we have us. We have this teased up a pretty good amount honestly, but i'm just going to get back in there. Um and again, like i said before, i want to start at the base and i want to start in the middle, because this has a tough time getting into the center. So you just start backcombing like this. Essentially, what we're doing is we're tangling the fibers together. It'S it's getting rid of any remaining silky texture, tangling, the fibers making introducing like a lot of of air between them and because we're tangling them it kind of, is starting to want to stand up by itself. The hair is all interlocked together and now suddenly, without any glue or without any hairspray, we have a spike that's standing up by itself. This is really important to do on the base, especially because that's where a lot of the strength is going to need to come from if your spike is not standing up by itself, you probably have not teased enough, so just go back and do it again and Then, adding more teas to the rest of the spike is going to introduce more texture, the first two rounds of teasing. This is not to hold its shape. This is just to introduce texture, so it does not matter what it looks like it honestly should look pretty messy and pretty bad. This is not what we want from our final wig, but this is what's going to introduce a lot of texture and a lot of volume into this spike. So this was a lot a lot easier and faster because it had already been teased before your first time is probably going to take quite a bit longer than this. But here we go. We have a spike that stays up by itself and we have a spike. That'S got quite a lot of texture, but we also have a spike. That'S really ugly uh. I i don't necessarily recommend uh being done with your wig at this point. Um not sure how great this is to see on camera, but hopefully everyone can see the texture that is going on here, not fantastic. So now that we've introduced our teas and our texture to the hair, it's time to lock it in place with heat. So this is the process of softening the fiber and re-cooling them into a new and fun shape, which in this case is our kinked texture. So for my heat again i like using a blow dryer. I can put it right on the hair, but if you want you can use a hotter heat source steam is one thing you can use a flat. Iron is another. I love using that myself, but we are going to apply our heat now. So one thing you guys can see is that suddenly the hair is a lot more floppy. Suddenly it's not staying up as straight, and that's because we've really softened the fibers. The hair has become a lot more malleable, but we need to let it cool, unlike human hair, where you usually heat it and then immediately it's styled. The trick to this is the fibers have to cool down, so don't touch it until it is completely cool. Otherwise, you're just going to undo all the work you just did, but it should also be a little warm to the touch and visually. You can see it not standing up quite as straight as it used to, but it's already cooling down pretty well and i'll. Just come back to it in a minute or so all right. Our hair is basically cool at this point, and so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take that tease out and all i'm doing here is just combing the hair. I really do like using the teasing brush for this. I can use a fine tooth comb. This works just as well, but sometimes sometimes i feel like. I get the comb in a little deep, whereas it's not possible to get in particularly deep with this one and i'm getting a whole bunch of hair at once. So just kind of gently comb it out from the top to the to the base of the spike. Make sure you get in there and get the center out as well? We really don't want anything. We really don't. We really don't want any knots or any remaining t's left in that hair. This was purely for texture. This was not for structure. One other reason. I think that this is incredibly beginner friendly. Is that it's pretty fast? I used to actually only use foam work. I i did not like to tease at all. I didn't understand it. It didn't work for me. I didn't like the texture, so i would only do foam work and it would take me forever to do any styling, because foam work is kind of a little slow and it requires a lot of patience, whereas when i said all right well, there's a look. I really want to do and it was actually squirtle, which was the first one where i said this. This just is not for foam work. It just really needs to be a big fluffy teased shape, i'm just going to bite the bullet and do it and then i did it and i said holy crap. I did this so fast. This is so this is so straightforward and so quick, why? Why have i not done this? Why have i been punishing myself, uh, and so now i t is like everything i think i think i use this method for most of my wigs at this point all right and with that we have brushed out all of our tees, but we are still left With this amazing texture - and we had already teased it a little bit, so it was a little fluffy already, but now, after doing it a second time, look how thick! That is, that's absurd, even without it being teased it's kind of staying up already. So that's a really good sign. I'Ve worked this wig a lot. I don't feel bad if, after teasing two or three times your hair is not quite this fluffy, but just do it again and again until you introduce the amount of volume and the amount of texture that you're happy with that's the nice thing about this method. So here, if we even compare this spike like how thick this is going back and looking at our totally unteased hair, there's just absolutely no comparison whatsoever. This is this is only this much hair just just for context. That'S how much we started with the the equivalent of this, so that's the power of teasing and under structure um. This is a really nice thing to start spiking with and as a result of it being so fluffy and already so teased up. We don't have to do a ton of work for our final step, which is one more round of teasing, but for this round we're not looking to introduce texture. This is going to be our final movement through the hair, and what we're looking to do is make this thing structurally sound and get it moving in the direction that we want it to go in. So this is our final tease as a result, we should not make it very messy, because this is what's going to be visible and also we want to make sure that it's really secure. That'S that's what we're going for with this final one. All of your other teasing rounds are about texture. This one is about structure so again, starting in the center starting at the base. Tease it a bit the base is okay, you can tease a bunch on the base. No one can really see it honestly, so you can go ham here. That'S all right, don't go too ham, though go go, moderate ham enough so that it's quite secure but does not look like a huge mess. Um you, we will be covering up a lot of the visible texture with that hair that i set aside earlier, but there is kind of a limit to how much you can cover. If this is an enormous mess, it's going to take more hair to cover it, and if you didn't set aside enough to start with, you may struggle, if you don't have to tease it a ton, then it's very easy to cover it. So just bear that in mind. Another way that i've seen some people introduce teasing is through a crimping iron. That is an easy way to introduce a lot of texture really really fast. It'S not my favorite texture look um, but then again i don't like a lot of teasing anyhow. So i really like doing it myself manually like this, but that's definitely one option. I think that's really beginner friendly as well all right, so we've got the base. Looking pretty good and as you can see this is this - is pretty structurally sound this. This is a good looking spike. That'S going to last you throughout the day. One other thing is: while this is our primary hold, this is our secondary hold and we do want to use it. So i like to spritz a little bit kind of get it into the center of the spike. That'S going to be hard to get to later. The base is also very important right now, i'm just getting it onto the inside of the spike we're going to use a bunch of this on the outside, but it'll be hard to get to the inside of the fibers after we've teased the entire thing. So we've done the base and now it's time to do the top and with the top one thing you want to ask yourself is: what direction do i want this shape to go in because holding it in the direction you want it to be. That'S how you're going to tangle the fibers together and that's the direction it's ultimately going to want to stay in again. The physical hold is the thing that we want to dictate the shape of the spike, not necessarily how we shape it and then spray a bunch of glue onto it. So for this i have the example i like to do. A lot is a kind of curve. Just to show how extreme you can do this, if it's a spike, you can do that too, but for this let's do a little curve and kind of hold the hair in a curved shape, as we tease - and this is not going to be perfect - that's what That'S what the that's, what the glue is for, but this is going to get us started and we want to tease all over these on the top, the bottom, the sides, but whenever you can kind of hold it into that curved curved shape. This is great for doing any kind of spirals any kind of bouffants um. I know spiking is quite common with with anime and cosplay, but i love you doing weird shapes out of this. So, like i've done like a water wig, i've done two water, wigs, actually um squirtle's another one, which is also a water wig. Okay, this is really good for water is what i've now discovered, but curves are fun. I love them, and so here is a nice curve that is kind of staying up all by its lonesome, without any glue kind of looking at the texture, not bad it's. This is definitely coverable, but it's also very thick. It'S a really good, looking spike and it didn't take much hair at all and it's really really light. So i'm pretty happy with this, and now the next step is going to be to heat it up a bit in order to lock that texture and that structure into place. All the hair is tangled together, and we really really want to solidify that. It'S really the base that needs the most heat in this case um. While it's heated up, you can actually affect the curve of the hair a little bit more. If you want not a ton but we'll give that a little while to cool and then move on to the next step, so once dry now it's time for our secondary hold. This is where we add our hairspray got to be. Is a usa favorite? If you guys can find it, but we're going to add this as our secondary hold, especially around the base and then pretty much everywhere, this will help keep it in shape. If you need a more extreme shape that you cannot get through teasing like say, we wanted to do some kind of little corkscrew. We'Ll do some little grinch thing here. That'S where this comes into play, small modifications and just adding a little bit of oomph. You don't want this to be for structure, so why did i just blow dry that you don't have to do that? This will eventually dry on its own. However, it takes a bit takes longer than you would think, and if the hair moves at all during that process, it's not going to hold as much when i first started using this. It wasn't working at all. For me, my hair kept falling out constantly, and i said why am i so bad at this? This is terrible. Am i am i stupid uh and the answer was no, but i wasn't using it properly because i would spray and then i would say i need to fix it. I need to do something. What you want to do, if you're like me and are impatient, is spray it and then immediately heat it up. That will immediately set it and it will become very, very hard and solid. It feels a little bit like glue, and this is pretty structurally sound, like i'm messing around with it, and this is not going anywhere and that's from our physical hold, combined with our secondary hold of glue. So i like this, i'm happy with the little weird grinch thing on the bottom: i'm less happy with the texture, but fortunately that's why we have all of this smooth hair that we can cover it up with. This is not insanely kinked, so we don't need a lot of hair. What i will say, though, is work small. We only want to use a little bit of hair at a time because in this case, there's no physical hold we're only using glue to hold this hair onto our understructure. And so we need to make sure that we saturate all of the fiber. Give it a little bit of a comb to make it straight now, if i were to take a big hank of hair like this and just say, i i just want to put it on much like i used to do back in the day. The problem with that is when we spray the bottom and the thing we're putting the hair onto with glue, and then we spray the top with glue. If this was a huge hank of hair, i would be missing all of the hair in the middle. That hair would not get any glue at all and it would fall out over time because there's nothing holding it down and that's why you would get flyaways things popping out. It'S just not looking good in general, but when we work small, you can saturate everything. I'M gon na actually use my comb to hold it down a little bit top looks good bottom needs more hair, though you see how you can still kind of see the texture through it a little bit. So i'm going to add a little bit more, not a lot. I think i don't think i need much at all in this case. This is also important for pre-planning your wig, because remember this was the first thing we did was set aside. The hair, you need to know how much hair to set aside when you get started and, for instance, if your spike is all the way over on the side of your wig, you need to make sure that you don't run out of hair at the at the End like if i was to put this spike all the way on the edge of the wig cap, how am i going to cover the hair? That'S just something you need to consider in your game plan before you really get started with your with your wig styling. So comb that out one more time and then lay it down honestly. So this is giving me a little bit of trouble because the hair doesn't want to go in this direction. It wants to go down, and so i have this odd little kink kink texture right here, very easy to fix that, though just soften the hair, so that now we can make it straight and fall in the direction that we want and push it down. One more time now, if i was doing this uh for realsies, for a wig that i would wear to a con, i would be taking a little more care um. The bottom is still a little um twisted uh i. What i should have done is either reverse wefted, this so de-wefted and added it back in in the opposite direction. So the hair wanted to point up, or i could have just taken the time to apply some more heat to it, but for something that we did in 20 minutes. It'S not bad and really. The idea here is that we want to keep applying this hair. All the way around our shape until it's completely covered in this slick fiber one other thing is that adding a bunch of this to the fiber on top it has become very, very solid. I don't think you can hear that, but it's it's it's pretty solid. This wig is not going anywhere anytime soon. So that's how i like to tease my wigs and introduce spiking big shapes big fluffy textures like that, but that's not the only way to create an extreme wig. If you need to create something that maybe would not work for this type of method, so say a really flat shape a really cartoonish or really slick shape, something that is not um. A large fat understructure like this that wouldn't be able to be maintained. In that case, i like to turn to foam work, and this is kind of what i was mentioning about. Considering what method is going to be best for your project? You can do any of this. I know someone who only does teasing. I used to only do foam work for a really long time, but now i like to choose which method i pick based on what i want the final wig to look like and i'll put a couple examples in here, but essentially it's the question of do. I want a more natural fluffy, looking texture or do i want something. That'S really unrealistic, really hard, just very, very stylized and also the question is, is: can i even do this with teasing? Is this something that really needs to defy gravity so much that i need a foam or other material base now with foam work, we still have an under structure, but, unlike this, where the under structure is hair, the under structure here is anything. That'S not hair. In this case, this is actually a piece of poster board because i wanted it to be really flat, but foam is very, very common. I like to use styrofoam because i prefer carving. I know some people use expanding foam, avafoam chicken wire i've seen used once or twice, but honestly. Anything that has structure is not going to bend a whole bunch and also something that the hair will stick to is going to be important. The only things i can think of that are probably not good, for this method is going to be something like silicon, because your glue and your hair fiber is not going to stick. I actually for beginners and for me, because i like to keep my life easy. I would actually say look for a material that the hair and the glue is going to stick to really easily. In this case, i loved using the poster board because it's absorbent and the glue stuck down - and it did a really great and easy job of creating this shape felt is another thing that i like to use um. Even when i use some other kind of foam. Like styrofoam or the avafoam a lot of times, i'll actually put a layer of felt on top of it and that's because the felt is more absorbent and i find that it, you get a better grip. You can stick hair to anything, but i think it's just easier if you pick a material or pick a pick, a cover, that's a little more absorbent, especially if you're new to this process. The main method for using foam core is that you want to essentially lay the hair down on your understructure. Much like this, but while i know a lot of people who well, i know one person who is very, very talented and she is able to use nothing. But this and god bless her, because i can't do that. What i like to use instead is a permanent glue, so white pva glue, tacky glue is that technically the one that i tend to use more often, i will use some tacky glue water it down to about one to three parts glue to water, and then i Will paint the hair with the glue and, what's great about that, is two things. First of all, it's permanent. It is not going to come out unless you soak the entire thing in water, like. I think we can hear this one, how hard this is. I'Ve dropped. This on the floor quite a few times, and it's still looking pretty good uh, and that's because this is just totally soaked through with a ton of glue. This is going nowhere fast, no matter how many times you wear this to the con. The other nice thing about painting and soaking your hair completely in a permanent glue, is that all of the fiber gets covered. Unfortunately, foam work is definitely a more time consuming process. I wouldn't necessarily say it's much much harder. It'S probably squarely in the intermediate maybe to the expert level of wig work, just because it's a lot less forgiving than this. You really do need to be careful about getting your hair on correctly, not tangling the fibers holding it in place until it's completely set. So it's it's a lot of making sure that you're working with your hands correctly, that can be kind of frustrating for beginners. So i would say if you've never really done any extreme. Styling start with this guy or when you start your project with foam work for the first time, try and go for a flat shape. Anything where gravity is going to be helping. You is going to make your life a lot easier, so, for instance, this leaf. That'S a perfect beginner project, because it's flat, i don't have to be fighting to twist around the fiber at all. I don't need to curve it around. A weird shape, like anything that goes around a circle, is definitely on the more difficult side. Something like this is going to be very beginner friendly for you, so this takes a while, unfortunately - and so i do not have time to do it in this stream, but i do have a handy dandy, video of when i was working on squirtle's wig. So for this technique, i like to use a permanent, transparent glue, typically watered down pva glue. But here i'm actually using a clear, gel called patex, which is great for small pieces. I'M first applying the glue to the base surface and then i'm going to run it through small pieces of hair that i've separated out like when we were covering our teasing under structure. Working small is crucial to this technique so that you can thoroughly saturate. All of the hair, as you can see, i am applying the glue first to one side and then i am flipping it over once i get the cat out of my way that is finnick by the way. I love him, but i'm applying the glue to one side flipping it over applying it to the other side, and that's so that i can be sure to coat every strand of hair with the glue making sure that everything is thoroughly saturated. Really is the trick here and then, because the glue is permanent, it means that the hair is never going to move. I actually do that by running my fingers through the hair, which not only saturates, everything, but it also pushes out any excess glue in case i've used too much in this case. It'S always better to go a little too much than to have too little and risk. Not saturating the hair completely once done. What i do is i lay the hair down onto my line of glue, and then you have a few seconds to arrange it. It'S not completely dry yet, however, do not touch it once it begins to dry, or else you're going to end up with pilling, which is small white balls of glue. Patex is actually a really great option for small objects, because not only does it dry really really fast, but you can actually rehydrate it a little bit if it pills up. Sadly, i can't buy this at all in the states, so i really do use white pva glue for most of my work, which gives quite a bit more handling time, which is especially useful if you have very long pieces of hair or are making a much larger Object for squirtle, however, it's great because the hair is very very short, and what i'm doing here is. I am pushing down the edges of the hair with pieces of tape so that it conforms to this shell shape that i've created. I made this out of foam, but then i covered it a little bit with paper which absorbs the glue a bit better and also it's actually going to make this removable so that i can pop it up at a later point in time and that's pretty much. The basics of how i use foam work with any of my wings really, no matter what kind of shape it is if it's flat, if it's rounded or if it's at an extreme type of curve, using glue saturated through the hair, is pretty much what i always Use, i hope you guys enjoyed this really quick rundown of extreme styling. Uh again, remember, there's no one way to style wigs! This is just what i personally like to use and what works for me. If you guys come up with something, please do post it. I always love learning about new techniques. If you're interested in more of our work, you can find us on kalba crunchies on instagram facebook and youtube cowbuttcrunchy on twitter, because the name is too long to fit in the character limit, and you can also find our book available in our store online. We also run a charity patreon where all proceeds benefit cat rescues because we love cats. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really hope you learned a lot and have a project that you're eager to apply this to, and i hope to see you next time.