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Make sure you play around with home-made blood before committing to buying expensive commercial blood
Type 4 - What We Used in Coriolanus
Shamelessly stolen and modified from somewhere online. Recipe modified and used in Coriolanus by CMC (cmclcas).
Advantages and disadvantages
- Completely washable (got all over white tank tops, as well as various other types of fabric and washed out completely every time)
- Edible/non-toxic (tastes like chocolate, probably would be bad to eat a lot because it's super sweet)
- Sticky (see above: very sweet)
- Looks pretty good on stage in my opinion!
Ingredients
- Corn syrup (any brand, just go for cheapest)
- Corn starch (also any brand)
- Cocoa powder (any brand)
- Food coloring (Target's Market Pantry brand, should be called 'Food Coloring and Egg Dye')
- I suspect that the washability may have been due to the food coloring being eminently washable, as I tested with another brand which stained
- Also, having multiple colors (as with the 4 pack from Market Pantry) is useful to calibrate the color to the exact one you want
- Water
Preparation
- In a container that is good for stirring, add enough corn syrup to be approximately the amount of blood needed
- Add approximately 1 teaspoon of corn starch and 0.5 teaspoons of cocoa for every cup of corn syrup
- The corn starch is just to thicken it, and can be increased any point following if needed
- The cocoa powder is to darken the blood, and can also be increased or decreased depending on color wanted
- Add 4 drops of red food coloring, and 1 drop of yellow
- Again, this part is just up to you, add more or less of each color depending on what you want the blood to look like
- Stir
- If it needs to be thinned out, add a SMALL amount of water (it goes a LONG way)
Applications
Body and hand packs
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For R&J (2016), we used plastic bag blood packs of the non-edible kind for Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris, and Juliet's deaths.
Coriolanus was a veritable bloodbath - we used two packs (leg wound for Aufidius as well as Coriolanus' death) as well as a large amount each night for dumping over Coriolanus' head ('Who's yonder, / That does appear as he were flay'd?'). These packs were made with very easily popped plastic resealable bags (so easily popped that in a few instances they popped before their time but were easily hidden). They were secured/pressurized by tape. The packs were made day-of every time, as it took maybe 15 minutes to set up the whole show's blood!
Warnings
The blood will not be visible from the audience under a lot of red light.
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