By "handling the foliage", do you mean working on ramification? If so, the suggestion is to just take some time building out ramification before making any style choices/ decisions?
The bark separates from the wood easily this time of the year. This is not the time to be doing any serious wiring and bending.
Right now is the growing season. Go trim some foliage properly - you can do one branch only or you can do the entire tree. Call it ramification, if you wish. I think of it more as keeping the foliage from running away (getting farther from the trunk).
Now, you have nothing to do with them but to let them grow until the end of the season. You could use this 'idle time' to plan what you are going to do when the time arrives. Of course, if you just want a zig zag that has pads at each direction break and one on top, you will, indeed, only need to 'build out ramification' into foliage pads.
If you want to make a trunk with a lampshade, you just need branches at the top and to watch those
Ryan Neil videos sorce posted. Procumbens(1) looks to be good material for that kind of design. Procumbens(2) looks to be two trunks. A mother-daughter or a father-son composition is possible since one trunk is much shorter than the other. One of those trunks needs to be bent closer to the other to make either of these. That would take some wire, some guys, and maybe some rebar, but would those trunks be the least bit interesting? They are likely boringly straight. A bit of foliage that cuts across it here and there will disguise that - where would that foliage come from? Then you try it (doing the heavy stuff when the tree is dormant). Your result doesn't please you - reenter the do-loop. Your result does, but the damn thing changed - reenter the do-loop.
IMHO, this is the process
to learn how to take a piece of raw material that doesn't have an obvious (at least to me as a beginner) and determine how to shape and style it into an acceptable bonsai.