Hair Raising Adventures

Making Kyra's hair was the easiest part of making Halfland so far.  I used Drenthe Heath wool tips pulled off in short lengths, tied in knots, and glued to the finished skull with hot glue, one by one.

It went up fast. I used natural turquoise snail shells and small ringlets of tiny pale yellow shell beads glued in between the hair knots for ornamentation.

I created the same ornaments at the stop-motion puppet scale for use on that puppet.

Once in place, each tip was rolled to a fine point by hand with my matte medium (invisible when dry). This gave her a look of natural dreads that don't move much, even if underwater. In or out of the water, the style remains the same. Smart for me. Feminine and ethnically appropriate.

The same wool was used for her brows and eyelashes. I used matte medium mixed with pale blue paint on her hairline to tame any flyaways and add shading. 

I went back and forth with the scales where the tail and waist meet, adding dimension with wood glue and then painting to match the rest. I outlined these with a white paint marker and added more aqua scales to her front seam. It's funny about that front seam. It was where two mesh panels overlapped. I assumed I'd want to cut that "mistake" off for a totally smooth tail covering. But instead, I featured it as the coloration and texture of her tail right down the middle. It made the finished puppet far more interesting.

It took me forever to understand how to color Kyra's lips. I feel I finally got it, but it wasn't what I thought for the longest time. Being Caucasian, my lips have always appeared pinker than my skin, and being ignorant about darker skin colors, I hadn't ever noticed that some black women's natural lips are a dustier grey than the rest of their flesh color. It's so beautiful. And I never realized how it was. I caught onto it from a random video short in my feed of a Black man speaking to camera in natural light. I finally saw.