First Elizabethan hair trial.

Hair Trial.

This week we were asked to combine all of our skills learnt so far about crimping, backcombing, plaiting and so forth, to create an Elizabethan inspired hair look on a partner. I really enjoyed working on an actual persons head rather than a model head as you can really grasp how hard to pull the hair  and how the hair style will sit on different face shapes. I based my design on these classic portraits Of Queen Elizabeth as i like the handing tendrils of hair and the heart shaped style of this look. I think it  conveys the traditional style of the hair in this era and i wanted to create a very traditional look for my first trial.

The first thing i did was backcomb the crown of the head to create a beehive shape, leaving the bottom of the hair down for a later part of the hair style. I then plaited the main section of the back of the hair and wrapped it into a neat bun at the back of the head and pinned it into place.

After this I backcombed the front sections of hair either side of the middle parting and pinned into the  traditional heart shaped pieces to match the Elizabethan era.

I left a thin layer of this front hair out and used the Bobby pin twist method to create small crimps in the front of the hair and pinned these into place of the top of the heart shaped lumps.

I then plaited the bottom section of hair into two parts that fell either side at the back of the head.

Looking back on my work i think i should have used more crimping. However i wanted to create a look that would have been a young Elizabeth when her hair was still often seen not as crimped and worn down. i wanted to try this also to see the mixture between a period hair look and a contemporary makeup look. If i could do it again i would have crimped the whole head of hair but at the time i thought this was the right decision. In the future i would like to try out a fully realistic Elizabethan look.