Bruises are one of the SFX basics. They're easy to do, as long as you don't think about it too hard.
The biggest mistake I see is making them too neat. Perfection is the enemy of bruises. Colours end up in rings, everything starts becoming symmetrical and suddenly your bruise looks more like a target.
My biggest trick for avoiding that?
Draw a map.
More on that in a minute.
✦ I'M NOT THE PAINT POLICE ✦
There are loads of ways to do SFX makeup, and this is mine. Special effects is full of artists figuring out their own tricks, adapting what they have and occasionally MacGyvering things together until they work. If you've found a different technique that works brilliantly for you, keep doing it! These tips are based on my own experience, teaching, and years of talking shop with customers, clients and other artists.
For most people, I'd recommend grease paint.
That's what you'll find in most traditional bruise wheels and palettes. Grease paint is brilliant for bruising because it can be applied very thinly and blended easily into the skin.
That's important. A bruise is supposed to look like it's underneath your skin, not like something you've painted on top of it. You want to be able to see your skin through the colour.
If you're working on a film set or need a really high level of realism and durability, alcohol-activated palettes are fantastic.
They're also considerably more expensive and more technical to work with.
For most people learning SFX, Halloween makeup, theatre, cosplay or just experimenting at home, you absolutely do not need to jump straight into alcohol palettes. I'd put those firmly into the next-level professional kit category.
Absolutely.
I use face paint for bruising quite a lot, but you need to be comfortable manipulating the consistency of your paint.
Water-activated face paint can easily become too opaque for bruising. Use plenty of water and work in very thin, translucent layers. You should still be able to see the skin underneath.
Everyone develops their own technique, but for bruises most people generally prefer fingertips over brushes or sponges.
Put a tiny amount of each colour onto a different fingertip and gradually tap the colour onto the skin.
And I mean tiny amounts.
It's much easier to add more than to discover you've put a giant purple blob on someone's forehead and now need to make it disappear.
If you're working with several colours, assign different fingers to different colours.
Most importantly:
Keep one finger clean for blending.
Think of it like the clean blending brush you'd use for eyeshadow. Some fingers put colour down; your clean finger blends it.
If an edge is too strong, one colour is taking over or something just looks a bit weird, use that clean fingertip to tap, smush and soften it back into the skin.
You're building up lots of very thin areas of translucent colour rather than one heavy layer.
Real bruises change colour as they heal, so the colours present can give an indication of the age of an injury.
That's important if you're working to a specific brief where continuity and accuracy matter.
But most of the time, that's not actually what people are asking me for.
Usually the brief is essentially:
"Make me look bruised."
You're trying to clearly communicate bruise to whoever is looking at it.
For that kind of makeup, I'll happily use a mixture of reds, purples, greens, yellows and other bruise tones. I'll generally use more of the lighter colours and smaller amounts of the very dark colours.
If you're creating an injury for a specific character, absolutely think about the backstory. What happened? Where were they hit? How long ago did it happen?
But if you're making a bruise for Halloween, a theatre production or an SFX class and nobody has specified that this injury occurred exactly eight hours ago, you don't need to turn it into a biology exam.
This is the big one.
When you're deciding where the colours go inside your bruise, imagine you're drawing a map.
If you look at a map of a little village, everything isn't arranged symmetrically around the post office.
There's a church over here.
A school over there.
The supermarket is down the road.
There's a playground in one corner.
Maybe there's a shopping centre.
For reasons nobody can adequately explain, somebody built a roller-skating rink on the outskirts.
That's your bruise.
Put some yellow over here. A little purple somewhere else. Let some red disappear underneath another colour. Bring a little green through one area. Leave other parts alone.
Different things are happening in different places.
You're not trying to create a coherent pattern.
You're trying to stop yourself creating one.
This is probably the biggest beginner mistake I see.
You start with one colour.
Then another colour goes around it.
Then another colour goes around that.
Before you know it, you've created a beautiful little bullseye.
Break it up.
If it starts looking symmetrical, draw a map.
Add a peninsula. Put a river through it. Build a church. Move the playground. Stick the roller-skating rink somewhere completely inconvenient.
It sounds ridiculous, but that's precisely the point. It gets you out of thinking about neat shapes and into thinking about irregular areas.
Bruises generally don't have a perfectly drawn outline.
Use that clean fingertip to feather and soften the outside edges so the colour appears to disappear into the surrounding skin.
There can absolutely be areas with stronger definition depending on the injury, but if you find yourself carefully outlining the entire bruise, stop.
Remember what you're trying to create: colour appearing through the skin, not a picture of a bruise sitting on top of it.
If you're struggling, look at real bruises.
If you've got one yourself, have a look at it. Otherwise, reference photographs can be incredibly useful for seeing how irregularly colour actually develops.
Look at where colours collect, where they overlap, where the edges disappear and how surprisingly messy the whole thing can be.
But don't become obsessed with copying somebody else's bruise exactly.
Look at references to understand how bruises behave, then come back to the actual person in front of you.
Their face, arm or leg is three-dimensional. Look at the flesh you're working on. Think about where the injury is supposed to be and respond to what's actually in front of you.
Use translucent colour.
Work in tiny amounts.
Keep a clean finger for blending.
Avoid symmetry.
Soften your edges.
Build colour in different areas rather than stacking neat layers on top of one another.
And if at any point your bruise starts looking like a target:
Draw a map.
