Costume Makeup - Making the Wound Bloody

Let's go on to cutting it. Now again, we have our palette knife or we have our very dull kitchen knife. Even a dull kitchen knife sometimes has teeth on it so, you want to be very, very careful not to cut your model. So, dont use the tooth edge. Make sure you use the dull edge, and that's why it's pretty good to have a palette knife, because they usually dont have teeth on them. Then basically, we are just going to take the knife and this is the really fun part and you start to work it into the thick part of the wound, and I'll actually just pull this knife through the wound like so. We take a tissue and wipe off the excess and then depending on how drastic I want it to look; I can actually open this wound up and give myself a lot of skin texture going on. So, I can ripple it, I can open it, and I keep removing the puddy from my knife. Then you can see you get a real 3D effect of the broken skin and that is opened and a lot of injury has actually happened. Now, I can take my palette knife or a brush, and I'll go into a little dark, bloody red, and I will just paint in the interior of that molding puddy that did not previously get colored. So, I am just filling this in with dark red, bloody red, and again I just almost pat it in, and get it to color up etc. etc. etc. Ill add a little bit more to these areas that I didnt get. Good, now I've got pretty nice coloring going on down in the cut where it has the most injury to it. The next thing that I will do is to use a jelly blood. Ben Nye makes two wonderful bloods, one is called Fresh Scab and the other one is called Thick Blood. A Fresh Scab is a little bit better in color with a textured sponge to create an abrasion, like a scrape, but either one can be used in this instance, and it's thick and it's jellied and it doesnt drip. So, now we are going to apply the Fresh Scab or your Thick Blood into the wound.

The other thing about Ben Nyes products, his blood products, his liquid blood is mint flavored, and they also make Blood Gelatin Capsules, so that you can fill the liquid blood into the capsules and hold them in your mouth, and in a fight scene or something like that, after about two minutes you can bite down on that capsule, and the blood will trickle out of your mouth, and it's mint flavored so it tastes good. How clever is that? We are painting in the jellied blood. Theres the jelly blood coming out of the wound. The last step of this process really then is to add the liquid blood. Here's the liquid blood, the mint flavored liquid blood, and what you have to remember is that when someone is injured it has to look natural. The blood has to flow naturally. So for instance, you wouldnt want to lay somebody down on their back and pour the blood and have it go up over their forehead and then when they get up and walk around there's blood going the wrong way. So, when if you are ever shooting a film, or you are trying to do an effect or something like that, you have to make sense of where the blood actually flows. This is why we put a cape on most people or a paper towel, or even a news paper, because sometimes the blood will drip. You can use a stopper for this or you can just pour it out. So what I do is, I get them to close their eyes, of course, and I am going to gently, you can get a shot of this -- pour the blood into the wound, and her head is back and then keep your eye closed please. Then I let her head come forward and I can maneuver the blood coming and dripping out of the wound. So, you want that really natural kind of effect. Sometimes, I will take my finger and smash it, because that gives you an extra effect. You can smash the bud as if -- now it looks like she actually hit her lips, in some kind of accident, and the blood is dripping down from the forehead. If youre ever filming or something like that you can put the blood in there and actually film it dripping, but basically you want to catch most of the drips and all of that, before you go up to the front door and scare someone to death by keeping the drips from actually falling in your eyes. You can maneuver all of the blood a little bit more around the wound and thats why the jelly blood is wonderful, because its actually -- the jelly blood is actually staying in place, and it always looks bloody and raw, meaty in the middle and the liquid blood will actually drip and fall into it's natural placement, by the way you maneuver the head. So, I think Vanessa you can open up your eyes.

Now, if you are not really, really hurt and there is our Wound Effect. You can do it on your nose, you can do it in your forehead, you can make a slit throat, you can put them almost anywhere. Just realize that the more moving part of the body you put it on, the harder it is to stay on, because as your body heat starts to warm up during the night, and it stays on for quite a while, it starts to get a little bit more flowable and it can actually have a tendency to want to move them and maybe even to want to fall off or almost melt away. So, I would like to use the hard surface like the forehead, the cheek, the nose, anything that has a thin skin, and a hard surface under it, will work great for you. So, here is our face thats not only having done a bruise, but the bruise goes very, very nicely with our wound and the molding wax that we've created for your scary Halloween.