Evaluation

Although hair styling is not me strongest skill, it is certainly a keen interest of mine, I have always been interested in wig work although the process looks daunting and would require a level of patience I have never had its something I am drawn to.

In all honesty I was sure I would be among the slowest in the class, the level of intricate detailing and patience would show my flaws and a big concern of mine was not being able to finish my work within the deadline, another fear I had was I would not be able to create the looks I envisaged given time frame without panicking and rushing my work which would lead to things going wrong.

When we started creating the historical and contemporary hairstyles, I fell in love. the histories around each style, the influence and even society having such a powerful influence sparked a passion to try harder then I thought was possible. One area i particularly struggled was the actual process in how to set the hair, furthermore how to actually dress out the hair and have it looking perfect. even though we have a level of tools and products that were not easily available when these styles were common it was still a struggle, It must have been a lot more time consuming when these styles were worn (and uncomfortable!)

Although I am by no means good, or even reasonably good at styling hair, I take a lot longer than most of my class mates, however I rely on a good eye of seeing how the hair style will unfold which guides me. the skills I have learned in this unit, for me are life changing, although I have not mastered any one skill in particular, it has given me the ability to toughly understand the roots to a hairstyle, its underlying influences and knowing this the ability to make the style unique to the head of hair  I am working on. I have defiantly fallen in love with the skill set I have been given and will continue to master them.

As I expected and dreaded knotting was an absolute struggle from beginning to end, my lack of motor skills and disabilities I feel were a major hindrance. these factors coupled with me being unable to take my time in slowly and meticulously knotting each individual strand of hair with the delicate and patience required made a very complex and hard task so much harder for me. it at times made me feel helpless and although for a time become an obsession of mine (looking at countless images in step by step tutorials) I still do not have a firm understanding or even the skills to do this confidently (I sadly only realised I can watch youtube videos which were so much easier for me to understand, but by then it was not late).

Although knotting the wig was the hardest challenges i have faced so far, when it came to creating my final idea for my wig and styling my wig out that was one of my biggest challenges in this unit. I ran in to difficulties in preparing the hair and putting it into rollers for the toughest job, this was mainly because the length of hair for my wing was inconsistent and for me to get them into the rollers was tough but to keep them in the rollers was a nightmare

For my final idea I picked the 1940’s as that is by far my favorite era. The look I went for is the victory rolls and my contemporary was a modern twist of a single victory roll with an inspired 1980’s frizz ponytail. When it came styling my historical 1940’s Victory rolls it was a big challenge because the wig had many different sizes of layers and creating that victory roll was not as easy a initially expected.

One massive flaw that came back to haunt me was I did not really understand the effect the length and layers of the hair would have in styling the hair and so i should have taking this into account before picking the style I went for. Had i taken these considerations into account i would have styled the hair differently and have a much better final outcome

In the future I will defiantly take into serious consideration on these key factors:

• length of the hair
• the style of the wig
• the length of the layers of hair on the wig

These factors would make a considerable difference to how easy or hard it would be for me with my level of skill to effectively create the style i am going for.

I was really happy with the curls on my wig, as mentioned early this part of my work was difficult and therefore I expected bad results but I was shocked when they came out better then I could of hoped for.

another area which gave me problems and highlighted my inexperience, was due to the fact that my wig was too small for both of my models and it was difficult for me to hide the hairline of the wig. i dealt with this by trying to manipulate the hair forwards so it completes the look and hides it being too small.

One very import lesson i learned, which is consistent in all of the hairstyling i have worked with so far is that each scenario, cut, head of hair is unique. the challenges with each style, hair, product and tool are unique and more important than any one skill is the ability to adapt to the situation and use your resources to make good any problems. i was forced to think on the spot under pressure many times and this is usually an area in which i personally collapse, the fact that i can carry on and fix what does not work out is a very important lesson and skill I have attained. its helped my in making my wig look a lot more natural.

A lot of the individual skills I learned were useful but the biggest skill I learned was to tied them all together and just make it work, i have come very far from having zero skill but I am by no means confident and have a long was to go but that fact I genuinely enjoy practicing the skills I learned from this unit, i know i have enjoyed each challenge even though i used to be scared of problems and i learn from each one with makes grows my levels of skill and confidence