With the westy, they have what’s called roses either side of the throat there where the hair will grow in a circular motion. Now, with the clippers, if you take this down and the coat is growing upwards, it will actually trim that coat twice as short, so be very careful. I trim from just below the throat, coming straight down to the breast bone which you can feel with the clippers. Feel it with your hands first. And we come straight across—this is your clipping line, to the top of his upper arm which is here. The elbow is here and the upper arm is here so we’re going to clip with a 5F just to the top of the upper ear, behind the ear by two inches down to there. This is going to be our clipping lines for the 5F. This is for a slightly thicker coat and it’s slightly more powerful and I'm using a 5F. So we slip the blade on, turn the clipper on, snap the blade on, okay?
I comb the coat down. Now the clippers, we want to keep nice and smooth and flat to the body. So come in on your line, come down and you’ll feel the breast bone through your clippers. Keep your clippers running nice, smooth, even arm movements, and then your clipper work will be smooth with a nice finish. You can just see there the beginnings of the rose where their hair grows upwards. So don’t clip that area, we’re going to tidy the area up with thinning scissors. So we’ve come straight across from the breast bone and I’ll just move him around. What I do is pull the hair up from the head, just hold him under the chin and come down slightly over the shoulder. I'm standing this way because we want to—we want a nice, smooth line over the shoulder. Keep the clippers nice and flat. I always say to people, “hold them like a pen, you must be flexible because you’ve got to follow the contours of the body.” If you hold it hard like a shovel, and you will get jaggly lines and lots of hair missing and what we call clipper marks which, if I show you here, if you run it down, you will see that we have created some clipper marks there.
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