Why I decided to cosplay Shego and styling her wig

It's been a while! And I'm TERRIBLY sorry. And the worst part is- I don't have a proper excuse at all. After my last blogpost, I didn't do anything but work on my cosplays (and boy, was I on deadlines! D: ). The other cosplay I had planned for Abunai! 2011 was Shego, the sarcastic villain from Disney's Kim Possible. Shego has a certain charm about her to me. She's evil, yes, and she'd fight Kim till her last breath. But at the same time, she's smart, loyal and caring. I like this contrast in her, though I never know the exact reason why I'm drawn to a certain character.
I just know that when a friend of mine said she'd always wanted to cosplay Kim, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands!
Too bad my camera died halfway the cosplay process, and I can't find the pics back that I had made of her costume... So I'm gonna give you as much as possible.

In this post, I'm gonna show you how I styled her wig. If you've styled wigs before, you're probably gonna curse me- but as I already said once, I'm still only learning!

I started with a long, black, wavy wig without bangs and a side-split (which was on the right side, lucky me!) that I bought from a friend of mine once. The first thing I did was cut the small pluck of hair that hangs loose from the rest on her forehead. It was kinda scary, cutting in wigs, because I hadn't done it before, but all went well. After I attacked that pluck with hairspray so it would stay in place, I started to divide her hair, parting it in horizontal layers. I decided that, to create the "bigger" effect, I wanted to "flick up" her hair in the middle so it would stand out wider. I divided her hair in a high layer, on top of her head which I rolled up and kept in place with curler pins. The rest I divided in a middle- and a lower layer. The middle layer I split in three and rolled those up as well, and I braided the lower/neck layer, since I wasn't gonna do anything with that part of the wig anyway.





This is what it looked like from the top and back. Looking back on it, I think it's kinda hilarious. :')
You can also see the braid on the right picture. What you can also see, is that I (tried to) split the hair  on the braidlines. Made it way easier, logically.

After that, I took the hairsausages apart one by one. When I took the first one apart, I found out that the amount of hair was too big to comb up all at once, so I had to split it in half again and then comb it up. As seen on your left.
It looks pretty bad like this, and it was. :') It'll get less though.
Combing it up proved to be pretty hard. But then again, a kanekalon wig reacts a whole lot different on what you do with it than real hair!



Here's what it looked like when I was done with the middle-lower half. It looks horrible, I know, and it would probably send shivers down a professional cosplayer's spine, but still. :') I used a lot of hairspray along the way to keep it up like this.
After this, I started combing up the middle-upper half. And instead of combing on top of the selections of hair, I combed it up on the lower side. Again, using a lot of hairspray along the way. 

Done with this, I let the middle-upper half hang down on the lower half, and it formed a really weird bobble. With help from some water to unharden the hairspray where needed, I evened it out a little. Because I had combed up the lower half of the middle-upper part, the hair on top wasn't all strangled. You could still see I flicked up the hair midback, though...



Done with this, I finally took the knot on top out and tried to divide the hair evenly over the rest, making the combing up less visible. Using a lot of hairspray again to keep it all in place, I tried to hide the strangled-up parts as good as possible. I succeeded a little.

Here's how it finally looked like:

Thanks to the extra light on the middle picture, it looks a lot worse than it actually looked in reallife. 

Most people are probably gonna say this is no way to treat a wig, but this is what sounded most logical to me back then (and now still) and it worked. The hair stood out bigger, but not unnaturally big. It was just perfect, really. And that it maybe looked a little messy didn't matter all that much, seeing as Shego's hair is wavy from itself. Next time I wanna do something like this, I think I'm gonna try to find another way to make the hair look bigger. C: 

Well, there! A Shego wig! I'm proud of it. It looks incredibly Scene-style without the actual cosplay, but look what it does when I'm all dressed up! 

Can you believe that's the same wig? Well, I certainly can't! Also  look at my Kim. Isn't she pretty? <3 

More pictures can be found on Lizz's site, or in the file with all the pictures Melissa shot that event. 

For next time, I'll try to find the pics back that I DID make while working on this cosplay. They have to be somewhere, right? D: 

Making this cosplay certainly was an interesting process, because I had to work with Lycra, so I do think it'll be interesting to share. C: 

And that'll be all for today. I'll try to kick up the next blog posts a little faster! x3