Wesley Scoggins March 19, 2008

Indy Mogul

Wesley's Weekly HOW TO: Basic Burns

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Tags blood, make-up, cuts, burns, bruises, burnt, disfiguring, third degree burn

Burns are useful for so many things in film, everything from being splashed with acid, to falling into a fire, to being shot with a laser weapon, they can be useful in a lot of circumstances. Thankfully you don't have to be rich or a make-up expert to make a realistic looking burn for almost anything you need.

Start out by cleaning your subjects face, and applying the liquid latex to the burn zone, let it dry, and then...

 
Lay down a base layer of reds and pinks. The core of the burn should be red, while the edges of the burn should get progressively pinker, fading into your skin tone. If you want a 1st or 2nd degree burn, you can stop right here, just add some blisters (which we'll cover later in the tutorial.) and you're done.
 
 
Now layer dark reds mixed with blacks over the red area, fading into the pink on the edges. You now have officially a 3rd degree burn, you can stop here if you want, but you'll want to pop it because heat that can cause blackening of the skin also usually causes rupture.
 

Just pop it loose and pull it back a little so you have a nice hole in the burn layer.

Then I layered more liquid latex and some pale pale yellow paint in the wound to look like the hypodermis (the fat layer).

 
I then layered more dark reds and blacks in the wound over the yellow.
 

I teased out the edges of the wound a little bit to make it kind of stand up a little higher. And there you have it, your terrible 3rd degree burn is ready.

For Blisters, you'll want to add them in on the edges of your 3rd degree burn in the pink and red (they'll be at the core of the burn in a bad 2nd degree burn), make a slit in the latex with a pencil or a paper clip. I know the blister isn't in the right place in this wound, I should have added the blister in much earlier on the edges of the wound, but hey, better late than never.

 


Then get a piece of toliet paper, roll it up, and stick it into the cut, it'll puff it up and make a blister shape, you could also put some lotion in the section to make it look more "liquidy", but you reseal the wound with more liquid latex, paint yellows and pinks around the base of the blister, and white around the top very lightly. It looks kine of out of place in this photo because it lightens the burnt skin around it so much, that's why I suggest placing them earlier, much easier to incorporate them into the make-up earlier than later on.

 

But there you go, a horrible disfiguring burn and blisters. Hope that fits in well with the other various torments you'll put your actors through. 

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