Fake blood

So … for entirely innocent reason, I need to make a set of bloodstained bandages for an upcoming larp …

Any recommendations? Dark brown/red paint? Food colouring?

For the bloodied bandages I made, I mixed brown and red acryllic paint together, watered it down and applied liberally to bandages.

For extra “squick” factor I dabbed a few areas with thick, non-watered down paint to get ‘crusty bits’.

Once dry the paint won’t run.

My balcony looked like an abbatoir when I did this. Meters and meters of stringy, bloody gauze.

That sounds like precisely what I’m after. Thanks!

This is so awesome.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Fake-Blood
Personally, I would go for edible ones :smiley: mmmm chocolate blood.
But get the feeling you want dry blood so alot of this might not help.

would be handy for the Ovidians. nomnomnom.

So … if I want to make permanent bloodstains on some costume items …

Beetroot juice?

I have used food colouring (mixture of colours). Coffee. Or paint. Depending on the result you want of course.

Yeah, I’d do food colouring. You can use red for recent looking stains but if you want them to look older, perhaps mix a small bit of black in with it

Remember that “old” blood is brown not red. So think about how fresh the stains are.

For next Teonn, I’m making tears in my (cloth) armour, then repairing them, and want some suggestive dark stains to show that “blood was indeed spilled by the blow that caused this”. Hoping it will lend the armour a nice battle-worn aura.

I would lean towards the brownish more then. Perhaps you can rinse the clothes in water shortly after, fading it a little to show you had attempted to clean it perhaps

We’ll see how it goes. I have lots of offcuts from building the armour, so I’ll test on them till I get the effect I want.

For old blood I’d suggest trying a rimu coloured fence stain with just a touch of red and a touch of blue enamel - The enamel is to mix well with the oil based stain. You’ll have to play around with the mix slighty to get it right, but the reason I’m suggesting oils is that i’ll give it the slight sheen that dried blood has. Acrylics, or even beetroot juice & food colouring will look too dull and flat.

The guy who did the guts video also had a quick recipe for fake blood: basic clear school glue (some sort they use in the USA, with red food colouring and a drop of blue or green. But you’d need something browner.

Apparently coffee grounds make good texture for scabby bits.

My latest batch of blood was made with food colouring and it was far too pink for my liking - even though I tempered it with a bit of blue.

To this day, for fabric and “permanent” stains I’ve found that thinned down acrylilc paint yields the best results, with the most control, and the easiest clean up.

One thing that’s helpful is to look at pictures of real bloodied bandages. A bit yucky, but lets you see the colours/textures you’re trying to match and that can help you mix up the right shade.

(Oh, the stuff I saw when googling references for Taiah’s severed head… :/)

[quote=“IdiotSavant”]The guy who did the guts video also had a quick recipe for fake blood: basic clear school glue (some sort they use in the USA, with red food colouring and a drop of blue or green. But you’d need something browner.

Apparently coffee grounds make good texture for scabby bits.[/quote]
School glue is thinned PVA. Either buy some from School Supplies, or buy the woodcraft-grade PVA from Bunnings or Mitre 10. 8)