Those are awesome! I'd never have known they were wigs! 

RR, thanx!!!!  That's the whole point in hand tieing wigs and the reason I put the pics on here.  Most people when I tell them I make wigs for a living picture the kind of wigs you buy for Halloween.

SH, now I'm going to have figure out which one of your alter egos would need the most interesting wig.  I have a quest!!!!

dressagedude:

So  I have  chatted with some of you and posted many messages on here for a couple of years now and told all of you that I build wigs for a career.  I am fully aware that this is not a career that a lot of people run into on a regular basis. So thanx to journeygirl teaching me how to get pics on line I am going to try to post a few pics of my work so you can see what a wigmaster does.

This first one is for a teenage girl who was playing a teenage girl but had to be blonde and of course the actress was brunette, so I made her a wig.

 

 

You're welcome DD.  I'm still amazed at what you do. 

dd, those are beautiful and so creative.  Gee, when you mentioned being a wig maker I was picturing giant Dolly Parton cotton candy towers.  You are a man of great taste and skill.  My hat (fortunately not my hair) is off to you.

Oh, SH's current alter ego that needs new hair: 

And I must tell an interesting wig story....  In high school I had long blonde hair, so did my best friend.  We bought 2 short brunette wigs which we would don in order to play pranks ie: toilet papering houses, cruising Whittier Bl., drive-by guy sightings, etc.  It is amazing how different you can look and act with different hair.  SH, get your order in.

dressagedude:

Akhal-teke, that's one of the great parts about hand tieing wigs, I can blend the colors however I want.  Making blondes look natural is one of the hardest because so many different colors show up in blond hair naturally.

  I got in to doing wigs because I have always played with hair and I started doing theatre when I was 12.  I did get a BFA in costume design and it was my first costume design instructor who showed me how to tie hair and told me that there are people who just do wigs for theatre.  It was pretty much my goal from then on to be a wig master.  There are schools that offer degrees in wig and makeup design.  The two I know of are Cincinatti College of Music and Theatre and The North Carolina School of The Arts.  I did not attend either of these.  I apprenticed under a wig master and then while I was working at The Alabama Shakespeare Festival doing wigs I went to cosmetology school to learn a few more fundamentals of hair cutting and styling.

Well you're obviously very talented at what you do, it seems that you've made the perfect choice for a career!

Wow, those are cool!! In the 4th grade one of my best friends got cancer,, and I wish she could have had one of these wigs. They are sooo real looking!! I would have never thought that they were wigs!!

G&L, I would love to get in to making wigs for cancer patients but I still have a few things to figure out before I do that.  The wigs I make are theatrical so there is actually a very fine lace on the forehead.  That is not something that one would want to wear on the street where one is face to face with people.  I don't think I could keep the hairline quite as natural for  a wig to be worn on a daily basis but there has to be a way to make it come close.

I won't give it away and ruin things for other but I actually went to a movie last night and the lace on one of the characters wigs was making me crazy.  In some scenes it was fine but in others I could see where the makeup/wig artist had glued it down and it was rippling.  I have to be kind though because in movies it gets even harder to fool the audience that it's not a wig because of all the close ups and the fact that the heads are projected on the screen 12 feet high.

That reminds me of an opera I did years ago.  On one of the wigs (thankfully not mine) they initially got the colour balance a little off.  It looked fine face to face in the hallway, but under the tinted stage lights it came across BRIGHT pink with sometimes a purplish tinge.  Luckily this was spotted at the first dress rehersal, and they managed to send it back and get it re-coloured before opening night!