Makeup: a Black Eye and a Beaten Face

This is a DIY on how to make a black eye makeup – and a generally beaten up face.

I used this as a LARP costume, as my character had been found guilty of performing sorcery and was beaten by the king’s soldiers. It was an awesome game, and this makeup made it so much more realistic!

The look can be used as a Halloween costume, for a cosplay, a LARP, and so much more!

This is the first makeup tutorial video I ever made, and I had no working microphone. However I hope it helps visualizing the steps, as it was very hard to capture the process in pictures.

DIY Video

If something remains unclear I wrote down the process in the next step.

Ps. I’m not a mad or angry person, but it felt very wrong and somehow disrespectful to smile with such a grim face. ^^

Step 1:

I hope the video explains what I did well enough, but just to make sure I didn’t miss something or it was too unclear, I’ll go through the steps here.

The materials I used were some old eyeshadow, including the colours; yellow, green, purple, blue and red. I also used some theatre blood that was made for costumes. (You can make your own, but that’s a whole other story.)

First I applied a light powder to create a base for the makeup and even the skin a bit. Then I applied the yellow coulour around the eye – the yellow should cover every bit of skin that is included in the black eye – from the eyelid, corner of the eye, and to the cheek bone.

On top of the yellow I applied a layer of green, but I focused the green around the eye and didn’t go as far onto the face as with the yellow one.

On top of the green came purple, a bit of red and a bit of blue. Be careful with these “stronger” colours – they can get out of control easily. Focus them on the eye lid, just under the eye, and in the corners of the eye.

Then I added a bit of red face paint. (Lipstick works too.) I carefully added this on the lid and in the eye corner, and then blended it together with the other colours.

Then I made a bruise on my cheek bone. The steps were exactly the same as before: Add yellow, green, purple, blue and read eyeshadow – and a bit of red paint. Blend it nicely and thoroughly – and there you have an ugly bruise! (:

When the black eye and the bruise were done, I took some theatrical blood and added to the corner of my mouth and one of my nostrils. This was it looked like a split lip and a bleeding nose, which are common injuries if get beaten in the face (or fall down or something.) I smeared the blood around these areas and that made it look more realistic. After working with the blood I smeared a bit out in my face: If you got beaten like this and had a nosebleed, there would be blood somewhere else on the face too. This gave a weird and slightly gory finish.

That was the make up! I hope you liked it, and that the video helped visualizing the process.

Stay creative awesome people! (: