Arin Egoraptor pt 2 - Hair! - and a random Hocus Pocus review.

Hey readers!

This week is probably going to be a shorter post than normal - assuming I don't get wildly distracted and go off on a tangent about cotton candy or other nonsense like I did last week. No promises.

The reason this is likely to be shorter (spoiler alert) is that I was trying something new with hair that didn't work out, so I wound up doing similar hair techniques as I did with Danny. The plan was to a brushed yarn wig for Arin. Danny's hair is made from a thick yarn to simulate the curly and untameable mane that Danny rocks (also - sweet shirt, Dan). I wanted to use a brushed yarn wig because that would be much finer than Danny's hair and give Arin a big contrasting look.

"What the hell is a brushed yarn wig, jackass?" You might be asking. Well, first of all, no need to name calling. Second of all, a brushed yarn wig is when you separate yarn into its fibers to make it look more like a barbie doll's hair than standard yarn. Kind of Deep's tutorial was my first exposure to a brushed yarn wig. It is long and in order to make it more palatable, they show the video at double speed. It gives the whole video a kind of chipmunk quality. My next yarn weft tutorial came from Dollightful. In this video, she is making yarn wefts for clothing on an Eevee inspired doll. Apparently, her technique comes from Mozekyto, but I am less familiar with this artist's work.

Generally, you tie a few strands of yarn to a base - Dollightful uses a hanger, Kind of Deep just held the knots and Mozekyto has a special mesh they use. Then you use a pet shedding brush to separate the fibers. The process is slow and yields small amounts of hair at a time. Meanwhile, the brush quickly becomes clogged with yarn fibers that either break off, or are short - or both. Then you straighten the hair with a straightening iron on a low setting, cut the hair off carefully, and seal the edge with craft glue. 

That's a lot of videos leading me to attempt to do a yarn weft wig for Arin. I tweaked the plan a little. I wasn't too keen on sealing the edges with craft glue. In my head, puppets are going to get treated a little rougher than a handmade doll sitting on a shelf, and a human wig is going to have a lot of stitching to help maintain the hair. A puppet isn't doing to have that. I thought that if I used a strand of yarn as my base, I could leave the yarn in place and just sew that directly to the head.

Unfortunately, I quickly learned why Kind of Deep did such a short hair wig. Yarn is made from lots of short fibers twisted together, and no matter how long your initial yarn is, the length of the final product is limited by the length of these short fibers. I think I followed all the tutorials well, and in theory this would have worked. However, it uses significantly more yarn than my other techniques, and Arin's hair is longer than the brushed weft technique will allow. I do really love the technique, and brushed yarn is pretty easy to manipulate into a specific style. Looking at my attempt, I think it will make a great mustache on a puppet in the future.

So it was back to my old tried and true method. I would have been happier if I could have made the brushed yarn work, but the yarn I chose for Arin's hair is much thinner than Danny's, so I still wound up with a pretty significant visual difference between them. This time, I used my copy of Hocus Pocus to make the hair lengths. Since I had it out, I decided to rewatch it. I have a lot of concerns seeing it as an adult.

First of all, if Zachary Binx can talk as a cat, why did he stay quiet until Max lit the black flame candle. Wouldn't he have had a better life if he told his parents who he was? Especially since his parents know about witches - their daughter was killed by them and they hanged the three witches responsible. If anyone is likely to believe your "hey, I am a cat and your son," story its those two.

Also, for witches who know that they will die if the sun rises, they sure do take a lackadaisical approach to knowing what time it is. They get tricked into thinking its sunrise because of car headlights. Lets not even talk about how they must think we got a second sun in the 300 years they were trapped.

This is unrelated to hair. The rest of the process is just like making Danny's hair (hey linking to myself!). Arin has a blond streak in his brown hair that is seen in all of his cartoon versions. It switches sides sometimes, but I went with the side it is on his main "grump head" for the Game Grumps.

 I might style his hair with some glue later, but it was really starting to be obvious who he was. He still needs a haircut in that picture, and some styling. I am going to worry about that at the end of the process, but I plan to use some craft glue to give his hair some hold.

When all the hair was attached I realized the part was going to be tricky. The only other time I have done a part like this was for a puppet with really long hair, Courtney. I only did a few tracks of long hair so that there wouldn't be huge amounts of volume. The hair was sewn in such a way that there would not be any "scalp" visible in the part.

Since I needed to change colors in the Arin wig, there was a lot of scalp visible. This happens because I was forced to sew all the blond hair on one side, instead of letting half fall on the right and half fall on the left. To hide the scalp issue, I sewed a brown track of hair right down the middle, splitting the hair evenly between the two sides of his head.

The picture shows the back of Arin's head. You can see the pink showing through because of thee way the hair is sewn on. The hair I am holding up just gets sewn right down the middle and hid all the edges. Not only that, but it added density to the hair and reduced the overall number of tracks I had to sew in.

So there you have it, Arin's hair is in place and now it is time to work on his body!

Keep making fun stuff!
Until next time,
JoshPrime