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Hair Test 2Wool Roving & Wire

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For this test I tried to make hair by twisting some Beige natural wool roving between two threads of 0.08mm stainless steel wire, whilst trying to make the wire hidden as its only being used so I can try to animate the hair.

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First of all I got a long piece of wire and folded it in half so I could hook one end onto my home-made Dremel twisting tool. Next, twisted the two loose ends around a pin and then placed a piece of wool between the two halves. This was a little tricky but once I felt the wool was nicely centred between the two pieces, I pulled the wire taught and twisted it with the Dremel. Figures 4 & 5 show the results.

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I tried this method a few more times with varying amounts of wool to see how it would look. One issue I noticed though, if the wool slipped out at any point, it wouldnt get twisted between the wires which meant the wire would show on the outside of the wool. This needed to be fixed.

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Next I tried including some PVA glue into the mix. On another note, I noticed that thick bits of silicone didnt bend easily at all, so I had to re-think my plan about the characters bodies. This will be explored in the section on making the puppets bodies.

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With the PVA glue, I cut a piece of wire like before, this time I coated one of the halves in the glue and twisted the wool onto that strand so it was already in place when it came to twisting.

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Next I twisted the loose ends around a pin as before. In figure 14. you can see the hair ready to be twisted with the Dremel.

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Once I had a few strands ready, I gathered the tools and the tester scalp.

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I used the same method to insert the hair as in Hair Test 01, I made a hole with a cocktail stick, then made the pore ready with the dental tool.

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Image 22. shows the dental tool I use, its small but has a textured flat end which is perfect for pushing the hair into the pore.

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I had implanted the combover section of hair, so I made some more strands and cut them down to use as the shorter sections of hair.

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This is how Hair Test 2 turned out. I was worried it would look like he has some kind of weird dreadlocks but I dont think it looks too bad. The wire bends and holds its shape which is what I need. Next I will film my hair being blown by a hairdryer for animation reference, then test out the motion with some stop-motion animation on this hair test.

On a final note.... Try not to accidentally place the drill down where the ball of wool is. It looks funny, but its a pain trying to find the drill piece amongst all that hair

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Check out more about Mothers Days at: www.skygecko-nat.blogspot.com

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