Foam Hair, Bub

hello fellow maker welcome down to the shop we've got an incredible guest today representing the Pacific Northwest Emerald City ComicCon second place cosplay winner Christy the honest cosplayer thanks thank you so much for hauling it up here from Portland oh thank you for inviting me it's uh a pleasure to have you here we're really excited you had something very specific that you wanted to Showcase from your costume from your Link costume uh from breath of the wild is it breath of the wild or cheers of the Kingdom yeah this Emerald St com I cosplayed as link from breath of the wild and I made a wig out of EVA foam mhm this dashing number over here uh and you said you got a lot of questions about how it was made yeah and a lot of people wanted to touch it too and so I thought we could make one together to talk about how I fabricated that out of EVA foam that sounds terrific so uh I'm not going to do a link one I'm going to do my favorite character Wolverine a little simpler he's not going to have these ears but of course you could add to yours if you want um having a a wig made out of foam has a lot of benefits one being you can just like take it off like a helmet right um including like you don't need the prosthetic ears because they just sort of come off with the hair uh seems like a really handy and clever way to do wigs for a cosplay and I'm really excited to learn how you did it today let's take a look at a closer look at link here and see how you put it together there we go already showing how easy it is for it to come off of course this is patterned exactly to your head yeah so I I made this for a couple of reasons one is that I'm not a a wig or a hair stylist and so I wasn't really comfortable styling a wig and I thought EVA foam might be a great solution for my particular skill set which is working with foam and foam fabrication also I wanted to make something that would fit specifically to my head and I'm the type of person that has a lot of hair so I wanted something that could fit over that hair and I could just put it on and off and was really easy to travel with this is something that you don't have to worry about styling and restyling and I could paint it to the anime style that I wanted to the specific colors it is something that I don't have to worry about putting on prosthetic ears because they're already attached to it I think that's one of the best features and um this is something that my nieces love the the children in my family the ponytail attaches and detaches so depending on the that link is headed he might be falling it's posable POS turning left and right that's terrific there magnets in there yeah there's just some magnets which is super satisfying you can hear the like the Click of it um inside of it for some reinforcement there's some 3D printed elements just to hold that in place which is just made out of really simple PLA and then heat formed to the back of my head so that it's got a seamless fit there you go and there's some CA Bond along the seams just to keep it um just to keep the seams tight because you know your head gets really hot when you're wearing this so it just keeps everything together fabulous cool well we're going to do a slightly simpler version today got a head form to work on I've got a life cast of my twin brother which if you don't have a twin brother I recommend it uh so we're going to build it something that'll fit me and it's going to be a wolverine one uh without the ears should be nice and simple so the first thing we're doing is a uh basically like a foam wig cap right almost the same exact thing you would do for like a foam helmet we're going to make a pattern on our head or Rob's head anyway that handsome gentlemen uh we're going to do that with Saran Wrap or any any cling film type brand doesn't matter I just went for it is that okay like I'm going for it I just wrap the whole thing but this is a lot easier with the head form than if I was uh getting ined in plastic I mean usually it's just me doing this by myself in a bathroom you have a pair of scissors we should right there nice oh that's so nice and you can start cutting tape how long of a piece several like you know it doesn't really matter as long as we can get it nice and smooth I do kind of like to start I've had to do this a couple of times um just because as you're like for those people who do have thick hair or they have migraine or headache issues as your head changes you make different head forms I like to outline just about where I want it to be and then fill it in like coloring in the lines yeah I've also found with patterns uh it's worth doing like two layers of tape and get them to crisscross in opposite directions yeah does he has some awesome side Burns too doesn't he yeah where are Rob's ears are they about right here there okay let's do and we can um probably want to just pick one side mm or mirror it and mirror it yeah good idea I think that's probably deep enough for the widow's peak too draw in the midline here so that we can mirror it so that the sides are symmetrical so I'm adding some registration marks and um I'll make sure that my registration marks are varied for each piece so that I know how they specifically go together and which pieces match up got our Snoopy cap on a great start in fact this is pretty much how you start making something like a helmet out of foam which is why I wrote this book uh we have our third foam Smith book that's all about making helmets uh and a lot of the techniques we're doing today are probably going to cross over so if this is something that really speaks to you head on over to website and check it out we have print and digital available it's actually where I learned how to do this yeah that's awesome well I didn't there's nothing in there about making a hair that was all you but the wig cap wig cap for sure uh so next step we got to take it off mhm try it on my head yep should I just pull it off yeah let's take it off we'll trim off the Saran Saran Wrap and then we'll get on your head and see how it looks there we go yeah go for it and the registration is only on the one side because since heads are symmetrical we only really need one pattern and we can flip it over okay all right moment of truth we'll see how it fits and we we've got a a spot over here for The Sideburns too again only on the one side actually you can just yeah so this is a good this is a good point um so I'm going to make sure it fits hold your head steady it's nice to have friend to help you with this if or work in a mirror how do you want it to do you want it to cover your ears I don't think so I think it come in front of my ear like a Sideburn in front of it do we want to let's grab a reference photo uh this is one of my books about Wolverine cuz he's my favorite uh and I've got some good references here for what we're going after so his hair maybe a little swoopy thing on the front some sideburns may not maybe not the full sideburns because I can I can grow that if I need to but with the hair coming back like that but I also thought it would be cool um to do maybe a little blue kind of the way they do it in the comic books so I we want the widows peak for sure so coming down the side and then the swoopy things on the back maybe not that dramatic uh we got another example here there it is so that's even even more cartoony there that's kind of what we're going for I I think we should put Blue in it I think that'd be cool you can definitely you know when you start doing paint swatches you can match it to special effects makeup that you can then put the pigments into your natural hair to get like a to get a gradient effect too and because you do have a little bit of a salt and pepper already your natural hair it will Pi up that color vividly excellent yeah so first thing I'm going to do is Trace just where your ear is so we have a point of reference and then also where your natural like beard hairline is as we like figure out what we want that to look like M I think about right there is where your natural like hairline on your forehead is because Wolverine has a Widow's Peak mhm and we'll want it to to look natural is and I think we're probably going to need to add a little bit more tape here yes okay but we don't want to do that on your head cuz we could tape your hair into it if you've ever taped your own hair into something it's miserable it's a miserable experience um do you want really long side brush no they don't need to be crazy the first time I did a Wolverine costume was in 2013 I want to say and Brit did mystique and our friend did Rogue um we were running around Emerald City Comic Con and we f i got this photo I I'll dig it up uh we found these these parents had two kids one was myque one was Wolverine and they really wanted to get a picture with us the Wolverine kid had little cburn stuck to his face little claws it was hysterical that's amazing they had a they also had a Thor I think one of the kids was Thor and all the kids rushed over to get their picture taken with us and they're like not you Thor but we got this great photo of me and Brit in our costumes with our tiny doppelgangers next to us it was adorable those kids are probably like 18 now yeah yeah going to college at least driving Haine that'll just give us something to work with and then when we get to the actual like cutting it out you know it's foam so we can trim it down if we don't like it we can add more to it I think I'm going to go ahead and Trace the widow's peak here to which we can make more or less dramatic like less than Vegeta yeah yeah pretty dramatic okay sweet okay so now that we've got the pattern mocked up we're just going to cut out the pieces and the registration marks are already on it and I went ahead and labeled it so we know what pieces are what and it's just a matter of cutting out the side that we're going to be using I'm going to make a quick modification of this piece right like that and that's okay so far this process has been very familiar we got half of our pattern here our our first pattern uh what are we doing next uh next is transfer it to EVA foam and a assemble it see if we like it and if we do we can make some small adjustments and keep it and if we don't we can make some small adjustments and make it again very good so we have some four or I think maybe 5 mm thick foam this is what we had we're just going to cut out all these pieces yep just going to punch out these registration marks so that they can be transferred to the foam yeah it worked fine this looks like a Star Trek badge and then flip it that was a there you go thank you mhm kind of Wonder just how many hours of footage we have of me cutting out foam fabulous look at all these parts yeah this is again very comfortable very much like helmet making we have two pieces for each that have been mirrored uh and now we want to start gluing these all together yep so time to break out the contact cement and start to get the edges glued up all right I'll get the [Music] respirators [Music] n is that widow's peek oh that's nice when the seams come together like that yep it's very satisfying yeah it is need my new shower [Music] cap it's going to be awful pretty close though it's pretty close no one's going to have to get we're except for thousands of people on the internet I think I might have thinned the barge just a bit too much the time and something to think about too is that when you wear foam on a part of your body that's going to generate a lot of heat and sweat it will expand a little bit over time so that's something like it will stretch a little bit sometimes when I make stuff I know that I'm going to be wearing on my head I'll I will wear it around my house for a while just to like get this I'm going to wear this every day kid I think you should looks great it fits really good do you feel like you've got a pretty firm like if I was going to swing my head around it's not going to fall anything yeah feels pretty secured okay yeah okay well I think that's a good start mhm here you go rob oh that's such a good fit we got a little bit of seam separation that's okay we can fix that we'll reinforce that yeah so we're going to reinforce the seams on the inside just to give them a little bit of extra strength and also to keep the hair from from mixing with the contact cement it's just kind of a comfort thing and a strength thing and this is where I like to use CA Bond it's a nice reinforcing material so we just take the sticker tape and put it on the seam right down the middle and work our way I imagine this will help since my hair is probably going to be touching that directly and I'm going to be sweating in there help keep those seams from wanting to fall apart I've had a lot of success doing this I'm I tend to wear a lot of costumes on my head and uh this reinforcer tape has been a really effective strategy for bigger pieces and for smaller pieces and it keeps the like no matter what you always end up getting a little a little bit of contact cement here so it keeps your hair out of it which is nice cuz then you're not pulling your hair off when you take it off but also it's just keeps the seams together which you generally want to do underneath all the stuff that you're building on top of it I'm going to join the Aquabats just need the the the Eye pieces right there this is great this is like an awesome platform we could build anything on here if we wanted to but we're going to make Wolverine here this is your head Yep this is my head and we're we just have it here for comparison to say to show that it's a really different shape because we have really different shaped heads and really different needs mine has space for hair when I wear my wig and yours is a little bit rounder and it's got a really awesome Widows Peak so next it's we have to start styling it so we need to start to get some foam floofs and start to put the pieces on give it a little volume yeah and start to figure out where we want the shapes to be I've brought a couple of different things with me um I spent some time so I I cut the strands out of 2 mm EVA foam and I just used what I had in my shop available to me uh I use regular craft foam that I bought at my local craft store and it happened to be black EVA foam but you can use whatever color you have available and I kind of just a couple of different lengths I think 6 in 8 in and 10 in and it's just a strand of EVA foam like you would have a strand of hair and there's a lot of them the great if you got a like show you're watching put it on in the background get your cutting mat and just go to town making a bunch of strands for your thing then I took those and just like regular wig making I used masking tape and I laid those down and wefted them together into longer pieces all right and I can see you've varied the length a little bit so that it's not the ends aren't all the same length exactly I want to say like this is a technique I developed I I developed I figured it out I made it up as I went along I could see somebody taking a piece of EVA foam and cutting the strands out like you know like a longer piece and cting out yeah um so I experimented with that and I opted to do this because it created more texture and it felt more robust to me when I was making the wig so I felt like I had a more authentic like hair feel with it a really delightful looking hairpiece there so you can start to see like as you like apply that and lay it down you can then start to just like normal wigs start to style it and adhere it and put it together cool mhm and we have that in a bunch of different wefted lengths and then in individual hairs to put it together yeah and we want to do like that little strand coming out on his forehead there and then also to build some of the threedimensional shapes there are threedimensional Eva floofs made out of 5 mm foam that we can lay and then put the Ws on top of to create some dimensionality to it that makes sense too cuz we're not going to see the strands on the lower bit so you might as well just build that volume with larger pieces and then these are just cut out of EVA foam and then I imagine just rounded with a rotary tool I just used a rough grit sanding drum it I didn't need to go into anything fine grit because no one's going to see it just needs to have a surface that's rounded so you don't have sharp edges fantastic some time has passed Christy's been doing a little prototyping over here just using pins so you cut out all these these floofs these volumizing sort of things to get the shape that we want you're just sticking them on there we've got more reference pictures as well uh but these are all things you made ahead of time yeah yep and in fact you've got a whole pile of shapes here that you used on link yeah and these were just shapes that you know when I was making the wig for link from breath of the wild I had a reference that I was working from so these are just shapes that I that I had made from that reference that I used to make these different pieces and so there's some that are just you know petal shaped and there are some that are different Moon shapes and there are some that are longer shapes and they just really came from looking at my reference and kind of guesstimating what it was going to look like and again just using the pins it's one of the greatest things about foam you can just pin the thing together ahead of time before you glue anything to get it close to what you want the final look to be and this is definitely approaching Wolverine esque yeah it's a little bit like styling a wig and that we want to create the General shape of he's got kind of a rectangular ear parts and then the sweeping back part on his scalp and then you've got the sideb burns and the curl the front curl the swo spit curl I guess these are all very technical wig terms cuz we're experts in this um and you know the next steps are going to be to start to use a little bit of heat to shape these things and glue them down and since this is going to be something that's on your head where you do have a lot of heat and sweat we'll want to use contact cement for that to really like adhere it to it yeah you don't want the hot glue melting and part of your hair sliding off and it's I mean it's really messy right now with just the pins but we'll trim those down we'll use a rotary tool to make the edges really seamless and then so like along the forehead here we'll want to make that transition to my skin a little nicer cool okay [Music] yeah [Music] so I'm just going to Mark out where I'm going to glue this first WFT I'll move the WFT off and actually apply the contact cement and then put the wet down so these are mostly just for indication I like [Music] it going to get it into the channels and onto the floofs I sectioned off the hair because the next step is to glue it down the foam hair glue it down to the wig probably the best best option is to use just regular old like washable glue for this and you can just saturate the strands and press it down and then give it a good 24 hours to dry and they'll stay in place and they're flexible afterwards which is really nice but because we're pressed for time we're going to be using contact cement so we're going to glove up get our respirators on and work a little more quickly uh to get everything set in place [Music] oh god oh it's you're doing great you got this disaster I'm sure it's [Music] amazing we're going to start to work on wefting these floofs and getting some strands on them Wolverine has kind of like a cool streamline layer hair layer over the top I think we'll maybe do a big weft over the top of it all right okay yeah terrific [Music] yeah [Music] a it saturate and lay the the strands and then let them just set until you can really smoos them [Music] down it up from the bottom a little bit from the top and keep just shaping it all I'm doing is putting them on here putting them on just to look at the shapes and the forms compared to like the reference to see if we're starting to approach the shapes of Wolverine um like stepping back a little bit further getting a little bit closer building up like this the front profile the side profile and looking at what might be the next steps to it so I'm just putting these on pting them in place because it's a really temporary way to do it and I'm kind of looking at you know is it a is it a small floof is a big floof um how does it look from the front how does it look from the [Music] side so I've added the big weft over the front of it and over the floofs that we glued on and then I've used the pins to just lightly style it to make sure that the profile is still matching our reference images and so that it's starting to look like Wolverine what we're aiming for and even though it's still kind of Loosey Goosey here and there I think we're getting closer to what we're yeah what we're trying to achieve so next step is going to be getting the big weft here that's pinned down it's all these pins holding into place yeah so we're approaching the end of like the the physical construction of it excellent mhm I love how it looks me too yeah definitely this the profile from the front is really [Music] terrific [Music] these are just getting press together a bit [Music] after getting all the the glue in all of this hair and styling it a little bit we went and had dinner let it dry and now we can pose it a little bit really kind of smush it together style it even a little bit more and twist it if we think it needs that we're trying to get like the sort of swoopy De that his thing's got going on there uh but also we want to trim it yeah we got like this wacky wacky mullet going on down here we can probably remove that well I can definitely just hack do it a good amount off the back there get that started so satisfying all right still fits great news yeah look at the back here so the back is a little bit there's a little short yeah little G we could probably put a another we there if we wanted to but what do you think for the like when you're looking at the shape of it front wise it is pretty great okay cool and I don't think the sideburns need to go much further down than like here like have them swoop back or something okay instead of having like a hard rectangle Edge on the bottom okay swoop back right about there yeah we uh decided to extend the back a little bit we added another piece here and we're going to layer some more some more WS underneath this [Music] guy [Music] today is a new day uh we let everything dry and air out it was a little stinky in here we had our respirators on for all that contacts M we had the door open we had a fan good to remember if you're working with contact cement uh we trimmed The Sideburns those got a little shorter we worked them around my ear a bit and then we tidied up his hockey hair we got this glorious mullet this uh Angus mcgyver looking thing in the back and I just love it looks like he just came off the ice we figured that Wolverine is probably while he does has have some incredible ear floofs maybe a little bit more of a party in the back sure oh yeah business up front party in the back uh so now we got to do the little little swoopy Dangle on the front of his forehead there and we've got two little um pieces that are assembled and there's already some glue ready to go there mhm just going to guess a little bit here going to attach that and we can trim that a little bit shorter give them and two cute and kind of finger shape it it's time for sealing we're going with flex Bond it's a PVA sort of thing U we thinned it a little bit with some water about four to one so we can really get it down into the uh the strands and we're just going to coat this entire thing there's a lot of different ways you can seal foam this is my personal choice um mostly because it also adheres all the strands together so it's just another layer of adhesive as well that's going to create a surface that we can it's dripping it's dripping he dripping it's dripping so we're really working it down into the the gaps and everything mhm all right we went and got lunch while we waited for the ceiling layer to dry and it's mostly dried now for some genuine excitement we're going to paint this black hair black buckle up everybody this is more less exciting than spray painting a gray 3D printed prop gray we let the black mostly dry and it looks pretty good but we want we want to add something else and a lot of the references his hair is actually blue they add blue and I feel like they're trying to do the highlights in blue so what we were thinking was get a light and as we move this across the head we can see the highlights move so we'll pick up a spot let's say like this and from my perspective this is the most lit up spot so maybe we add some blue streaks going across like that the good news is if we do it and it doesn't look good we can just paint it black again and try over so I guess I'm just trying to simulate a shine that's going over his head of course we have different lights now we decided to try this smooth satin from plat effects it just feels like the light blue I'm actually doing just a little bit of almost dry brushing kind of taking the paint I have and dragging it around a little bit or doing like yeah just a little hit of it here and there I don't need to like paint each strand I can just sort of cruise across them and get a little hit like that I think that's pretty good we did it chrisy we did it uh thanks to your efforts especially doing all the prep work we got this done in just a couple of days uh this is really cool I've never thought to do anything like this and well let's throw it on my head uh we went with kind of a cartoony or comic Booky looking uh effect on the hair I'm thinking if I ever make a costume for this someday maybe I'll repaint some of the parts to make it match the costume but I kind of like the idea of doing a costume that's meant to look like it jumped out of a oh my God it looks so good a comic book yeah that's I think that's one of the cool things about foam is like you can repaint it as much as you want oh yeah it looks really good yeah it covers all your hair in the back um it looks like it and you can just take it right off it's like Lego guy hair styler or anything it definitely looks like Wain like I don't think he washes his hair every day let's see is this I like the little soup in the front like a little a little bit of unkempt swept there we go I've got my claws too actually here where's your right hand have a claw there you go this was so much fun I implore you invite your friends into your shop to teach you something new cuz it's a awful lot of fun yeah we've had a lot of fun yeah uh thank you again Christie uh the honest cosplayer on Instagram if you want to go check out what she's been up to of course uh there we go we have links down below to everything we used if you want to try and make something like this for yourself it's not a ton of material this is like a few dollars worth of foam uh and a little glue and a little little paint so a utility knife please experiment M that'll do it for us today here in the shop thanks so much for watching appreciate you hanging out with us thanks especially to the members of our extra credit Club if You' like to get access to our videos a few days early you can join here on YouTube through memberships or over on patreon we'll have a link down below that will do it for us we've got to go sleep off our ramen hangover from lunch thanks for watching we'll see you in the next build [Music]

Channel: Punished Props Academy

Views: 18,882

Keywords: punished props, bill doran, kristy honest cosplayer, the honest cosplayer, x-men cosplay hair, how to make wolverine hair, how to make link hair, how to make foam hair, eva foam hair, wolverine hair, x-men 97, x-men 97 wolverine

Id: X1wRfWvB7Ys

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024