How to paint Blood

One of the most common element painted in a fantasy miniature is blood. There are thousands of way to make it and in this tutorial I’m going to show you something I’ve learned in my painting career. Maybe this is not the best way to paint blood but it is the one I like most and I hope it will help you to give more realism to your models.
The tutorial refers to human blood, if you want to paint alien blood or non-human one, just change the colors that you are going to use.

For this guide we will need only three colors: a black, a dark brown and of course a red color. I prefer to use a Vallejo Model Black, a Vallejo Cam Black Brown and particular kind of red, fundamental for a realistic blood effect, that is the Clear Red X-27 Tamiya. If we want to evolve our blood technique we will need a two parts glue, I use the one made by UHU.

First Version
The very first thing we have to notice is that the Tamiya color dries very very fast making a “caramel” like effect. That is extremely deleterious for the brushes, so we had better to use an old brush.
Let’s mix our three colors as required to obtain the tone of blood we like most. Do not skimp on the black and brown colors since real blood is very dark.

The blood is now ready. We can paint it more or less randomly on our model.
If we want to have spots of blood we have to load a lot of paint on our brush (but really a lot!). Let’s take the brush and put it vertically in the front of the model without touching it. Now blow the hell out of you on the tip of your brush , just like you were sneezing but try to direct the air only on the tip of the brush. In this way you will “throw” the blood in random spots in a very realistic way. Just remember to try this technique on a piece of paper before ruining your model…

Second Version
I’m going to show you a little evolution of the previous method. That is very cool to portrait extremely violent scenes full of gore!
First of all we will need the two parts glue. Let’s put on our workspace the reagent and the catalyst and mix it with a toothpick. For this stage do not use a brush because this kind of glue will damage it for sure.

Let’s mix the blood color, as prepared before, with the glue and wait some minutes in order to let the glue begin to dry.
When we see that the glue starts to make filaments, the mix is ready and we can put it on our model. For this part I use a toothpick too and not the brush.

Just like the other way to paint blood, I suggest you to test it on an old model. Once you will put the 

glue/color on a model you will not be able to remove it, so please be careful with your beloved miniatures!