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Costume Design & Construction

Beauty School Dropouts & Other Painted Wigs (5D+10C)

We celebrate many unusual holidays in the UAF costume shop, among them National Cheap Chocolate Day (February 15), and Cheap Glitz Week (December 26-January 2nd), but no holiday is better loved,  than National cheap wig and makeup day, (November 1st), when all the already cheap wigs and SPFX  makeup sold before Halloween drops to anywhere between half to 1/10th of the usual price.  We grab anything we can get those days, even those cheap nylon wigs where the hair is sewn to just the top of a tacky net "shower cap" type base.  We do this because these cheap wigs are ones you can do vile weird stuff to without guilt.  You can cut them up for parts, you can butcher several together like Frankenstein's monster, you can use glue in place of hairspray to make them stand on end, or hold their shape with no maintenance, and best of all, you can paint them,  all without sacrificing a good wig.  

Showgirl - 340

Showgirl - 1448

Hair : Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures

Bargain Witch Wig

 

Hair in African Art and Culture

Wigstock-The Movie

Hairstyles and Fashion : A Hairdresser's History of Paris, 1910-1920 (Dress, Body, Culture)

Good Hair : For Colored Girls Who've Considered Weaves When the Chemicals Became Too Ruff

Blonde Like Me : The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture

Dreads

Wigs and Make-Up for Theatre, Television and Film

 

Austin's Twin Girlfriends wig - Twin B

Fashions in Hair: The 1st 5,000 Years

The History of Hair : Fashion and Fantasy Down the Ages
1940s Hairstyles Marie Antoinette IV

June 802 wig

Big Jumbo Afro

Complete Book of Sewing

The Costume Designer's Handbook : A Complete Guide for Amateur and Professional Costume Designers

The Costume Technician's Handbook : A Complete Guide for Amateur and Professional Costume Technicians

 

Stage Costume Step-By-Step : The Complete Guide to Designing and Making Stage Costumes for All Major Drama Periods and Genres

The Magic Garment : Principles of Costume Design

Costume Construction

Elegantly Frugal Costumes : The Poor Man's Do-It-Yourself Costume Maker's Guide

The wig was dressed and pinned with a little hairspray and pins, then the wig was sewn as pinned, the silver braid was hot glued to the wig over the sewing to hold it together more firmly, then the whole wig was re-sprayed with a "hairspray" of 50-50 water and acrylic glaze soaking it along all the joins and surface.  After drying for 24 hours the wig was then sprayed with metallic gold hair spray, and brush painted with two shades of yellow-gold acrylic paints. Another layer of spray glue was misted over the top to "fix" the gold hair spray permanently.     You can kick this wig around the shop like a football, and it won't come undone.  

This pink wig is the only one from our great set of "Beauty School Dropout" wigs not to have "walked"  out of our storage before it could get photographed.  It too is built like a truck, and painted in shades of pink in acrylic.   This quick and dirty set of tacky tramp bimbo wigs for the female chorus of Lysistrata started out life as bright colored Halloween wigs, but in shades that don't harmonize well.  These are only dressed in tons of "Final Net" and colored hair spray so that the styles can be reversed for future use.  However, the simple expedient of getting a bunch of red, pink and yellow color, and adding highlights to all the clashing wigs that pulled the colors closer together, made our bimbo chorus look like they all went to the same bad hair salon.  Colored hair spray can add zippy highlights to colored wigs so that instead of a uniform yellow, a wig gradates from yellow to orange to flame, or a violet wig has perky hot pink highlights that give even these weird wigs depth and character that straight out-of-the-box ones do not have.

The Project:

You will need 

• A foam or cork wig head with table mount
• A cheap wig, preferably in a lighter or medium color
• a plastic bag to protect the wig head during painting
• Super-hold hair spray
• A spray bottle with a mixture of acrylic glaze and water, or glue and water
• A hot glue gun or needle and thread.
• Paints
• Decorative do-dads
• Pins, a wig cap, etc. to attach the wig to the performer.

Render your wig design on paper to give yourself a plan to work towards.  You may end up changing your plan slightly, but starting without a plan is definitely a mistake.  The instructions below detail how to do a green fairy wig like the one shown, but you may choose to design a different style of wig and can extrapolate your own process based on your design crossed with the instructions below.

Bag your wig form, and attach it to the table mount.  Put the wig on the head, and flip it various ways to see which will get you the shape you want.  You need not use a wig in the normal position.  In this case we determined that for the upsweep ratted beehive style we wanted. we would want to take this blond "rock star" mullet, and dress it so that it would go straight up in the opposite direction. You can also use gravity for setting a wig that goes up by working on it in the inverted position, and then flipping it one it is dried. Once you know what way you want to work on it, pin the wig to the head form, stretching it out at all edges so it won't "shrink" as you work.

 Here the wig is in the normal position.

    Here it is inverted.

  Plastic leaves are chosen as trim, and cut into smaller bits that are easier to attach:        Leaves are placed in position and sewn or glued in place.     The haoir is then frizzed and backcombed into the basiuc shape using hair spray.

  The wig is then flipped to that the fluffy beehive top is pointing down for final spraying. 

a mix of acrylic and water, or glue and water is made and stuck in a disposable laundry sprayer.

  With towels on the floor to catch drips, the wig is sprayed with the glue mix.   The wig is given a day to dry, then is put back upright:    A thinned mix of acrylic paint is put in the laundry sprayer, and a mist of lime green is added to the wig:  Various colors of green are mixed to make several spray and brush on colors:      Small bits of iridecent fabric are glued in, and final tweaking is done:  After drying, the wearer's head is prepared by covering with a wig cap made from old pantyhose: 

Then the wig is pinned on.  

When your wig is finished, photograph the sketch and the wig as jpeg files and post them to your File folder at the class eGroup.  Post a message to the group letting everyone know you have posted these pictures so you can get feedback.

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