Painting Blood and Wounds

Cuts, stabs, vampire bites, you name it. Here are some tips on how to make realistic-looking wounds, blood, and a little bit of gore.

Mixing Bloody Paint

Blood isn't just red. It goes from being orange when thin to scarlet to deep maroon when pooled. No matter what look you're going for, if you want it to be realistic, you'll need some pigmented paints. The 69-cent Craftsmarts won't give you the rich colors we're going for here. I find that Artist Loft tube acrylics and Vallejo model paints have really good pigments.

Here are the colors that I use. As I'm sure you've noticed, there is also some fake blood from the Halloween store. This is my secret ingredient for getting a realistic look.

Rather than using water to thin the paint, using fake blood gives you that wonderful red-orange smear while deepening your red mixture and giving a lively glow that takes it to the next level. On its own, fake blood drips right off of a doll's rubber face and plastic body, but when mixed with paint, it is able to adhere and dry onto the doll. It's also great for staining clothes.

When mixing the paint itself, I like to mix a darker and a lighter red, as shown above. To make it even darker, add a small amount of dark blue. Using blue rather than black to darken your red will give it more of a purplish hue, which looks more natural.

If you're mixing paint for dead or dried blood, use more blue as well as dark brown.

Make sure to add the blue a little at a time to make sure you don't make it too purple. If you add too much, you can always add red to bring it back.

Hot Glue Gore

Hot glue is a great tip for making blood drips and other gory goo. Whenever I've made severed limbs in the past, I always hot glue the ends to give them a textured, fleshy look. I used this technique on the severed head above.

Hot glue is great for drips. I used it along the edge of psycho Barbie's knife and also to close up the neck hole of her victim to the right.

Painting Lacerations

For shallow wounds, you'll want at least two colors: a base red and a darker version of that red. Use the base color to create the cut or other wound, and add the darker color in the middle, leaving the original color showing around the edges.

This makes the wound appear deep. You can see this in the example to the right, where I used darker paint at the root of the titan marks under his eyes. I also like to add a halo of pink pastel around any wounds to make them look sore and irritated.

For bloody wounds where the separation between skin and gash is less clear, adding a light outline will both define the injury and add to the illusion of it being deep and puckered.

After that, all that's left is to tie it all together by coating your carnage in gloss varnish or glossy Mod Podge to make it look wet.

Love,

Haley

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