Chad Michael Ward

[New Picture Set] The Bloody Bride

Added 2015-11-02 17:16:32 +0000 UTC

At the end of the summer, I told Meghan Chadeayne about my idea to do some sort of blood-soaked dress theme for one of our shoots. As luck would have it, she had an old wedding gown on hand that she was willing to donate to the cause.

Neither of us had any idea how much of a pain it would be.

We spent an entire afternoon making fake blood to use on the dress. In the end I think we ended up with something like a gallon of the stuff. Meghan went to work painting the dress in blood, gleefully and messily splattering the dress and just about everything else around it. I'm STILL cleaning up fake blood everywhere. We hung the dress out to dry, planning to shoot it the next day.

As luck would have it, Los Angeles had it's single rain storm of the year that very night, and all of the blood--and our hard work--washed away. By morning, most of the blood was gone.

Heartbroken.

When Meghan returned a month later, we once again set forth painting the dress, this time using red paint for most of it and fake blood for the accents. It was worth it, as the dress ended up looking much better than it had on our previous attempt.

The next hurdle was dragging the still-wet dress up a huge mile-high mountain to get to the fields atop it for the shoot. Meghan ended up sweating off a lot of her makeup, and we were almost out of light.

Undaunted, we shot like maniacs for ten minutes to get today's image set. In the end, I think it was all well worth it as I adore the pictures. I hope you do as well!