Assignment 5 Planning – Makeup Trial Run

With the weather threatening to rain at any minute, I persuaded my eldest son to be my guinea pig/model for my trial run at creating a mock bullet wound.

I had looked at a couple of Youtube videos for “how to” instructions and I followed a blend of these two videos: Hallowe’en Tutorial: How To Bullet Hole and Home Made Halloween Bullet Wound. I have to say that I initially thought it would be a piece of cake, but it is much harder to do than I envisaged.

So to begin with I dabbed a touch of liquid latex to my son’s forehead and then proceeded to layer bits of torn tissue covered by latex to form the prosthetic. Each layer has to dry properly and a hair dryer becomes very handy at this stage. Once all the layers have been built up, I then proceeded to poke hole with a sharp nail scissors in the middle of the prosthetic – this is the difficult bit as you can’t really feel how deep you are going and I didn’t want to cut into my son! Once that was done, I proceeded to widen the hole to an approximate bullet hole size. I then applied black grease paint to the inside of the hole to give it depth. Then I applied foundation to the prosthetic to blend it with the surrounding skin. It was at this stage that I realised that I’d made the prosthetic a little too big as it was crinkling around the edges just above my son’s eyebrows. Next time I shall know to make it smaller.

The next step was to apply some red grease paint in and around the wound. Then I added touches of green and yellow to reflect bruising and basically kept playing with the paints until I thought it looked realistic.  Unfortunately I hadn’t been able to purchase fake blood at the store, so I tried a red cream, but that was a little too orange for my liking. I tried mixing in a little black to deepen the shade, but the black was too overwhelming. After much trial and error and dropping the card I was using as pallet to mix the red and black, only to discover the card had landed face up between my butt and the side of the chair I was sitting on, covering my pants in grease paint, I eventually was satisfied with my result.

The different stages of building this make up are documented in the gallery below. All I need to do now is source some viscous fake blood.

Fig. 1 Layered tissue and latex prosthetic with bullet hole

Fig 2 Applying skin tone to the prosthetic and adding depth to the bullet hole

Fig 3 Adding colour and bruising

Fig 4 More colour and bruising

Fig 5 Final result sans blood pouring out the wound

Reference List

Hallowe’en Tutorial: How To Bullet Hole [vidcast, online] myeyeshadowisodd 03/09/2010. 11 min 37 secs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYRkj0-ywUo (accessed 06/08/2016)

Home Made Halloween Bullet Wound [vidcast, online] 0RainbowAngel0 23/10/2009. 7 min 08 secs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWfzlhYlPok (accessed 06/03/2016)