Modelling Crazily Complicated Hair

This was always going to be the most challenging part of the puppet. I wanted the ponytail and spikes of hair to be animatable, so that they could blow in the wind and whatnot. I also really like the texture created by embroidery thread coated in glue or hair, so I needed to combine these two elements.

I got some twisted aluminium wire and shaped it to the spike, leaving extra wire at the end.

I then wrapped tinfoil around the fattest part of the spike to create the bulk of the shape. I sprayed this with craft glue and then wrapped embroidery thread tightly around it until the correct shape of the spike was achieved. I spayed the whole thing with glue again. Once it dried, the spike had a hard, almost plastic feel to it.

I used this method for all the spikes, the ponytail and the curly fringe pieces.

I stuck all these separate components onto the head with epoxy putty, embedding the extra lengths of wire into the putty, which was a fairly tricky task, as I was trying to use as little of the epoxy as possible to keep the weight down and it was very easy to knock the other pieces as you were adding or adjusting another. But after a lot of struggling I got there! I let the epoxy set thoroughly and then used tinfoil to bulk out the rest of the hair.

I covered the face in clingfilm so as not to get spray glue on it, as I heard spray glue can dissolve polymer clay. I covered the tinfoil in glue and then carefully layered embroidery thread over it, until all the tinfoil was covered up. I sprayed another coat of glue and left it to dry.

I'm pretty happy with how the hair turned out and it is moveable! Woohoo! I think it looks good and it does resemble the sun which was the aim of it.It has not added that much weight to the head, however in an ideal world I would have drilled holes in the head for the extra wire sticking out of the spikes to glue into, as this would have eliminated the need for epoxy putty, and this would have made the head even lighter. As you can see in the photos, there is a bit of glue which has dried thickly and visibly, so I will try and remove this later.