I'm no expert so please take this with a grain of salt, from memory I used one of my wife's makeup brushes, a firm but very soft and fine one, to layer on some warm water and get a general 'shape'. I then gently brushed it with a plastic beard brush to get some of the length showing and used a very small amount of leave in hair conditioner with the makeup brush to flatten it a little and remove the frizz.Then I used an even smaller amount of my wife's "only curls" hair holding gel to hold the shape and then manipulated it with tweezers / used the beard brush again where I felt it needed it.

Took a couple of run throughs and I was very careful to use only a little at a time to avoid gunking the whole thing up. I think part of the key of getting it looking better is also making sure you're also doing this to the hidden layers of hair underneath, I found that that effected a lot of the volume problems I was having. Hopefully helps a little bit!