Blood effect

I’m trying to think of a cool originial looking why to handle blood effects in my game engine. I want this effect to be something fairly simple to render since it’ll probably be happening a lot.

The simplest idea I can think of is to have a transparent model blood splash, but that requires art and I’m lacking there. Another idea I have is to do a simple glPoint particle effect like Quake2 used for blood.

Anyone have some unique ideas or want to elaborate on ways of improving one of those above?