Dripping Blood Effect

1. create new document, 800 pixels wide by 700 pixels and filled with white. 2. the text to have bleed. Type the word you like. Select the text tool and pick a font you like. For the text color, pick a nice blood red shade. use color #9f0404. Click with the text tool in the middle of the document and type in your text. 3. Convert with Layer > Rasterize > Type from the menu. To center it, use Select > All from the menu or the ctrl-A keyboard shortcut. Now select the Move Tool or press v. Next press the align horizontal centers button up on the tool bar. This will center the text horizontally. For the vertical alignment, we want the text to be a little above the center line to give us room for the blood to drip down. We'll do this manually by clicking on the image with the move tool and moving it into the proper vertical position with the mouse. When the text is positioned, hit command-D (control-D on Windows) to deselect. 4. Time to add the drips of blood coming off the letters. This is done with the paintbrush, so select the brush tool or press b. Set the foreground color to the same shade of red used for the text. Choose a hard edged brush (I used 100%) that's 7 pixels in diameter for starters and make sure the text layer is selected in the Layers Palette. To draw the drips of blood:

1. First position the brush inside the bottom edge of a letter where the drip should begin. Be sure to start drawing from inside the letter since ensures the trail of blood looks like it's coming out of

the text itself. With the brush inside the letter, press and hold the mouse button but don't move the mouse yet. 2. After you press the mouse button, press and hold the shift key. This constrains the motion of the brush to be either vertical or horizontal based on whichever direction you draw in first. Using the shift key like this lets us draw perfectly horizontal drips of blood. 3. While holding the shift key and the mouse button, drag the brush downwards until you reach the desired length for the drip, then let go of both buttons. Here's an illustration of the process: 5. Now repeat Step 4 adding as much or as little blood drips as you like. Be sure to let go of the shift key after drawing each drip otherwise Photoshop will connect the drips together. Picking bottom edges and points on letters makes for a realistic looking bloody text effect. Lastly, vary the brush diameter as well since in the real world not all the drips would be the same diameter. I varied the brush between 4 and 9 pixels for this example. 6. Time to make the drips look more realistic. When a thick liquid like blood drips down a surface, it tends to be narrower in the middle than it is at either end. Also, the blood tends to pool a little bit into a droplet at the end of the drip. We'll achieve both these effects using Filter > Liquify. When the dialog opens, set these tool options:

Narrow the center portion of the drips. Select the Pucker Tool which causes pixels under the brush to be squeezed together. Now position the brush just below the bottom edge of the letter where a drip begins. Click and hold the mouse button and drag the brush downward towards the end of the drip in a continuous motion. Stop just before you reach the very end of the drip since we want to make a droplet at the end. Try to move the mouse downward at a constant speed. This will actually make the drips of blood more realistic looking since real drips would waver a bit based on slight variations in the texture of the surface that they're flowing on. Use the pucker tool on every drip your drew in Steps 4 & 5. Don't click OK just yet since we have one more thing to do while we're here in the Liquify tool. 7. Make more distinct droplets of blood at the end of each drip now. To do this, select the Bloat Tool from the palette in the Liquify window. This does the opposite of the pucker tool and it spreads the pixels underneath the brush tip outwards. To make droplets, move the brush so the cross hair in the brush is positioned over the bottom end of drip. Without moving the mouse, press and hold the mouse button for 1 to 2 seconds. The tool will continue to bloat the pixels underneath it as long as the mouse button is down. At the brush rate I selected, it only takes a second or two to achieve a nice

droplet. Repeat the application of the bloat tool on the end of each drip. Try to vary the sizes a bit to randomized the look. When you're done, click OK. The result should look like this 8. The next part of the process is to add some dimensionality to the blood using a Layer Style. Start with a Drop Shadow as follows. Double-click the text layer in the Layers Palette to open the Layer Styles dialog.

9. Next we'll set a bevel on the edges to make the text look three dimensional.

The colors for the Highlight and Shadow Modes are simply white and black. Use of the Hard Light and Overlay blending modes causes these to be blended with the red of the letters to yield a lighter red for the highlights and darker red.

10. Lastly, add Gradient Overlay to enhance the lighting effect a little.