By Dawn Omboy
Being creative with dog hair is another form of origami, and as groomers, we love to play, shape, and mold the hair. You know we have all done it, even if it is just making horns on soapy Shih Tzus in the bath tub. They are so stinking cute. Sometimes you just cannot help yourself!
This month I am going to share with you how I made lovely water lilies on my standard Poodle Birdie Jade. I first began with a freshly bathed and fluff dried dog. Believe me, that was a LOT of fluff.
I began by banding off a section of hair in the center of where I want to place the flower for the water lily (Fig. 1). With that done, the next step is to cut the outside shape of the lily pad around the flower (Fig. 2). Leave it big enough to tweak the shape of it. Slowly take off a little at a time until you are happy with the shape of the lily pad. Make the hair toward the base of your flower shorter than the outside edges. This will help give it more depth and make the flower stand out more.
The next thing I did to give myself a better visual was to use the new Critter Color from Warren London to add some life to the lily pad. I put a bit of the Critter Color into a spray bottle and spritzed and dried it into the coat. Once that was done, I used hair spray to stiffen the lily pad and scissored the edges to make them sharp, so it would stand out and off the dog (Fig. 3). I used the soft pink color called Alexa’s Soft Pink Kiss to color my flower. I then used the hairspray again (Got2B Glued) to stiffen the long pink tufts of hair so they could be shaped by my fingers into the thin delicate petals of the flower (Fig. 4).
That’s all there is to it! Cut it in, color it up, and shape it. Look at the pretty hair origami. The neat thing about the Critter Color is that it is a temporary hair color that will wash out or even just fade out, so you can change colors constantly with it. The formula is thin enough to run through your airbrush, too. You can use them to custom blend, so you can get the shades you want—even brown!
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