Kittan Bachika (Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann)

Ok, finally time for an actual making-of costume (or in this case wig) post, instead of just me going on and on about how I do things. That was the point of this blog, you know? I do enjoy to talk, so I hope I'm at least being helpful and not annoying.

Anyway, Kittan. Had a friend ask me to cosplay with her about 2 weeks before Nekocon, decided to do the first version of Kittan since I knew I could throw it together relatively easily in little time. Plus, I've always wanted to try making his hair as a wig.

So first off, I've discovered something useful when trying to make short boy wigs, especially spiky or "up" ones, within reason, using natural-style wigs instead of costume wigs meant for the purpose.

Curly wigs. No really. First, because a lot of the wigs that are meant for cosmetic purposes tend to be made a bit better, and I can manage to find them cheaply at a lot of local wig stores because they're so common. The wig I started off with I got for around $5 because they were getting rid of a lot of old stock (this particular one is a Paula Young "Heather" which seems to be a discontinued style), but I've gotten them in the $8-10 range quite often. The reason for the curly wigs is that they work better going shorter and up because of how they are made; the wefts tend to be a bit denser and closer together than most short and mid-length wigs, and they have a bit of body at the roots that assists in going up and into spikes. (The easiest way to tell if they will be good for this or not, is if you can see the wig in person, you can slightly separate the hair with your fingers and see how close together the wefts are at the roots, there are some out there that are really sparse that just make up for it with extreme poof.) Of course, you have to straighten them first. I discovered this phenomenon when I bought a light blue afro wig out of desperation in the hopes I could straighten it [link] and it totally worked. It's relatively easy, gently comb the wig out, then patiently steam it straight. It doesn't take too long, but you definitely can't rush it. It also helps to clip up the wig in sections and straighten it in parts, especially if it's an extremely poofy wig, and it also helps if you're going to spike it up to not straighten it all the way to the roots at the top of thew wig, leave the last 1/2" or so slightly wavy.


Anyway, so I started with this:




Brushed it out, sectioned out the part that would be Kittan's glorious rooster-hair (basically the whole crown) and began steaming the rest down:


I then carefully cut the wig with a razor and scissors, checking periodically to make sure I wasn't making it too thin, a good rule of thumb is that you want the hair you are cutting to be a few inches past the top of the next row below it and then carefully work shorter from that in tiny amounts testing it on your head periodically. Unfortunately, no pictures of this as I managed to misplace my camera and didn't have time to wait to continue working on it once I found the camera.

Then, time to color. Decided to make wig dye with an even amount of black ink and sepia ink to give it a bit of warmth, ended up having to go a bit darker than I intended as I wanted a good even color. Used my airbrush since I wanted the control of being able to get into precise areas (like at the base of the hair) as needed. Decided I didn't like the ash blonde for the remaining part as Kittan's hair is very bright, mixed up a batch of wig dye with a bit of golden yellow and canary yellow and sprayed just a bit on, just enough to give it a yellowy tint. Ended up looking like this:





Let it sit overnight, and then rinsed the wig in cold water, fortunately not much dye came off as it seems like when using the airbrush you don't have much excess dye. Since the wig felt a bit rough, (dying with ink will often make the fiber feel just a little bit squeaky, especially when you go from light to dark, I assume because of ink build-up), I combed and rinsed it in conditioner it which brought it back to feeling normal.

Finally, chopped into the crest of hair a bit with a razor and scissors to make it a bit more choppy and not just look like a plume of bed-head, and then added some hairspray and hair glue.



Now, if only I had a single picture of me in the costume, heh. There were a few things I would fix on the costume itself next time around, but overall it turned out ok.