Last fall I visited my friend, the lovely S.K. Hart in Massachusetts. The trip was primarily to hang out and see her in her native habitat...well let's be honest, the trip was primarily to steal Halloween candy from her kids and fill her mother's amazing bathtub with fake blood.
I had a post about this last year that went into some of the details about this fun and messy cover shoot, but I wanted to show a few photos we took during the process. That's her hand print on the side of the tub if anyone is wondering, and unfortunately I didn't get a shot of her precariously positioning herself over the bath to properly place it. No, she did not fall in, otherwise there would be a few photos of a very grumpy, very pink, and very wet author.
Her mother worked for a floral supply company and brought a gazillion daisies for our project, and was kind enough to let us use (and potentially destroy) her amazing claw foot bathtub.
Now, I have plenty of supplies for fake blood at home in Oregon. Plenty. A disconcerting amount. But naturally with the TSA liquid restrictions and potential of ending up on the no-fly list, I didn't bring supplies with me across the country. Of course, I figured no big deal, I could buy some red food dye when I got there, a little corn syrup and Hershey's chocolate syrup, and voila! Blood. What I didn't take into consideration was that it was almost Halloween and apparently other people were in the market for fake blood as well. We visited two stores looking for red dye, of which all varieties were sold out. Not willing to accept failure, I picked up some grenadine and the trusty chocolate syrup, but it just wasn't red enough. Thankfully Ms. Hart's mother had a tiny amount of red dye, along with other items to try like molasses, and we got the effect we were looking for.
