People know us for our custom wigs and beards for people but we also create quite a few wigs for dolls, figures and display pieces. Some of these projects are nearly life-sized while others are quite small. In some cases, we are building wigs that recreate a vintage puppet’s wig. Other times, we’re creating an original design. 

 

But for this project, the puppets were replicas of living people! We had a great time building these custom puppet wigs in collaboration with Austin Phillips of Phillips Puppets

John with his puppet figure
Tommy and his puppet

. The figures were created by Austin and were based on photos of the real-life people. We used photos to build wigs that resembled their hair as closely as possible. As you can see, the likenesses are pretty good!

Like all of our custom wigs, these puppet wigs were made from scratch and tailored to fit the block. We built the wigs on foam replicas of the figures. Every hair is knotted into the wig’s foundation one at a time. While working, we kept reference photos of the real life hairstyles close at hand. Once all the hair was in place, we cut and style the wigs. Then we sent them to Austin and he put them on his puppets.

 

It was really fun to create wigs for these puppets, there were lots of great details to copy from John and  Tommy’s actual hair.