The current short story upon which I work features blue priestesses who tell fortunes using cups filled with tears of blood.

So I wanted to make a picture of such a priestess. I envisioned a close up of her face with the blood tears flowing.

The first step was putting the basic scene of the head together in DAZ Studio.

As my renderer for DAZ Studio (and Blender for that matter) I sometimes use Luxrender. I don’t use it for all my renders, but in this case it felt right. (I cannot give you a good reason – it’s just artistic judgement deciding when things look “right” in one renderer versus another).