 Hello everybody Brian here and today we are going to be going through a how-to on hand-painting balayage. We've got our lovely model Kate here. She is no stranger to balayage so this is actually a really fun thing for me to do because she had it in the past and she was a really big fan of it. You can see there's some that's grown out but my goal here was not only to give her balayage highlights I really wanted to brighten her up a good bit so you'll see that in the before and after. So to get started we've got her sectioned off four standard sections working off the part. It's very important that you have them show you where their part is because that's where it's always going to be when they put it in and you'll see when we get to the front how the lightness effect is really going to work off that part really nicely. So we are doing a full head so we're starting all the way back to the neck taking their horizontal sections but their horizontal sections still kind of follow the round of the head a little bit. I personally am going to be choosing to work side by side as I go up through the back because I want everything to lift pretty evenly. I've chose Palm Mitchell's sinker lift here with a 20 volume for the back two sections and 30 volume for the front two. Actually it takes, this took me about an hour to do so it's pretty set up so I don't want you to think that I just rocketed through this because you really do want to take a lot of care when you do this because it's a service that is really going to showcase what you can do. So for everything below the parietal I'm taking a little bit wider sections because I would like to add lightness back there but I still want the dimension of it being a little bit deeper on the blonde. So to achieve that deeper blonde I'm going to leave more for natural in it. So the sections back here were anywhere from one and a half to two inches wide. I take sections that are about an inch thick because as I hand paint this on I want to make sure that when I press into the hair I'm not pressing all the way through which will cause heat. To apply this I have chosen to hold my brush vertically parallel with the hair. When I've got the product on the tip of my brush I start around mid shaft and sweep in a downward motion but then slowly move up towards the scalp. It's a tip I picked up, it's cool because you want your highlights to be a little bit thicker towards the end and finer as you get up towards the head because the effect of this is going to be a very natural, almost sun lightened kind of effect. I'm taking these sections a little bit wider again like I said because I want her natural to also dance in through there but I'm pinching the sections down at the end having each one come to almost a point. So what this effect is going to do, like I said I want to brighten her overall blonde so that's going to give her a deeper in the root out to that lighter effect so that it looks like the sun really did do this. Again, we're still below the parietal here so we're still taking the wider sections. Just keeping in mind everywhere you put lightener is where there's going to be highlight. So I wanted to be smart about in case she throws her hair in a ponytail what you will see along her hairline because those highlights are going to be right on front street. There's no hiding and this is not like foil work where sometimes you see these and sometimes you see don't. Like I'm working on how her hair is naturally falling so you're going to see every single one of these highlights. Again mid-shaft, slowly working my way up towards the head. I know it's not slow right now because we sped it up but in all actuality you do it slowly enough that you keep control over what you're doing. You don't want lightener flying everywhere. I always get a lot of questions about the consistency of the lightener I like to work with. For something like this I like to make sure that it is creamy but not too loose. You know you want it to be able to brush swiftly and smoothly but not so much that it's going to seep everywhere and start to bleed. There's a good shot where you can see just we want to slowly work it so that the highlight gets smaller as it gets closer to the scalp because you want control here. I chose to use the Syncrelift from Paul Mitchell on this one because it's a lightener that doesn't swell. I think that's probably one of the most important things. If you are working with lighteners that have a tendency to swell up as they develop then that's where you're going to lose that control and it's going to start to puff up and bleed onto hair that you want lighten to begin with and then you've sort of lost that that seamless possible sun lightened effect in the hair. So once I get down towards the end it really just starts to just to encompass the entire section that I'm holding in my hand. Feathered on at the root and then once those two lines start to come together and that pinch section is when I go ahead and just paint it right through the end. Now that we're above the parietal we're taking much smaller sections. I like to work in sections that are about an inch wide because with you doing those V-shaped sections I guess you could call them. You got to remember if these two inch wide sections are next to each other there are going to be two highlights sitting next to each other. So you're going to have a really nice blend of the new lightened hair with her natural coming through it as well. One of the reasons you want to switch to smaller sections once you get above the parietal is because in a natural sun lightened effect the hair that's on the top of the head is going to be the lightest. If you need a good point of reference think of a small child when you see your clients point at a little girl and say I want highlights like that. Why can't I have hair like that? Well because it's been naturally done by the sun because kids play outside all day and they have that nice fine hair that naturally lightens. So we're just going to create that look whenever somebody wants it now. So as we move into the top the sections get smaller because that makes the blonde more concentrated. The very top of the head might be a smaller section that you can't really get the V shape on. You want to just make sure that you don't just leave it out. Brush the highlights on right here around the face is a perfect example because Kate like so many others has finer hair that never really fully matured into thick hair. So I don't want to leave it out because that'll just leave it dark. So I'm just going to pull that piece out understand that where I visually put that is where that highlights going to be and then just paint it on that where possible. There's that. Hi Thad. Where possible I still do the V shape sections but then when I get to the smaller little baby hairs around the face I just go ahead and freehand highlight those. I get a lot of questions about can you put something in between these sections. Yes you can. I haven't done it yet because I haven't yet had the need to. I think it's partially the size of the sections that I'm taking and the fact if you notice the sections being held out at some odd degrees I've never been really good about it that 45 degrees or 63 degrees kind of but I'm holding the hair out from the head so that I'm not pressing down with the new section onto hair that I've already liked. You see I've got her head tilted a little bit as I move through the top because I want to make sure I'm not pressing down on anything beneath it. Again that's also why it's very important to make sure that you don't have a lightener that swells. Not that they're not good lighteners it just might not be the best one for this technique. Also since this video I learned a very valuable lesson. Now when I do this on my left hand I wear a rubber glove that I cut the fingers off of so that I could use the back of my hand as almost like a highlighting board. I never worked with a highlighting board. I might like it. I've just never used one so if anyone wants to send me one I'll try it but I I got a tip actually from YouTube somebody said try using the back of your hands so you don't have to wipe on a towel in between every single section because that does take time and the back of the hand tricks great especially when you put a glove on because then you never have to wipe it off because it never stings but it does it does cut out a lot of time not having to wipe your hands off every section because you really need to make sure that you're working with very clean hands because you're working in exposed hair here so if you have lightener all over your hands and go to touch another section then you're not in control of where that lightener is going. As you see here now that I'm working on hair that is directly around her face this is on some people what would be their fringe for her she keeps it longer but this is that hair that she's gonna see every single day when she looks in the mirror. So you really want to work and make sure that all the way around the face you keep it nice and light you can see the highlights they're getting you know a little bit thicker a little stronger and now that I'm on the part that's where you really want to focus because the part is always going to be seen that's why I said you want them to put their own part in there because you want to know exactly where that's going to be because unlike foil work we're gonna match up the highlights on either side of her part to make sure that they come pretty close to connecting because unlike foil work this is not as strong of a banded effect of lightening it's much more of a general area of lightning that you get from the hand painting so having it match up on either side of the part gives it more of a natural all-over-blonde look so that's where you want to make just take special care to make sure that you've got really precise sharp lines following that part and you see we're now approaching that last piece of fringe at the part so I want to make sure that that above all else has a really good strong light effect to it I've had people ask me why not just go ahead and lighten that whole section well the reason I don't want to lighten that whole section is because we've all had those clients that come into you and you've sat there and you've lightened them just as far as you could possibly get them they're a level 11 and a half white blonde and they say make me blonde well you sit there and you think to yourself how do I do that the best way to make someone look blonder is to give them some kind of contrast up against it that's why no matter how blonde someone is whatever their natural grows in there we say they have black roots you know they don't actually grow black hair it just looks darker because it's up against light so having this natural base of hers come through the blonde that I'm doing is going to make the blonde look blonder and then give her a very natural no maintenance low light as well I don't know if I mentioned it yet so I'll mention it again I did use a 20 volume developer in the back and a 30 volume up front because I want all of this to process evenly otherwise if I'd use 20 all the way through by the time the front was ready to come down the back would be significantly lighter and that's not really a natural effect so here you can see I'm trying to match up the highlights that I've got because I'm starting with each of these sections and I'm showing a little bit more of her part so as I'm pulling these I see where the highlight is on the other side and I try to match it up there's a good highlight right there and bring it as close as I can get it to the room it'll give a really cool dimensional effect that you'll see here in just a second on the weaker side of the part I did make my highlights a little bit stronger because I want to try to keep her evenly blonde so here you go there was no actual processing time on this I just watched it until it got to the blondness that I wanted her to be so you see she she has she was blonde before but now she's really got a blonde worth stopping traffic for and she was very happy I've seen her several times since then she still loves it and so do I so now we've got a new Bolliage converted client so thank you guys very much if you have any questions please post at the bottom of our video or on our Facebook and we'll be seeing you soon thanks bye