Don't They Teach You How to Draw Blood in Med School?

I've been working on drawing convincing blood in Paint Shop Pro. I basically want a fresh blood trickle running down a white background. I didn't really know where to start, but I knew that there'd be a lot of red. So, here's a sample of the methods I tried:

The left most one used a plain paintbrush stroke, which of course sucked. For the next one I laid the darkest colored stroke first, then drew recursive feathered selections within that, and tried to perform gradual fills within each selection, which worked better, but fills don't work well after the second one, because of the gradients you're filling. For the third one (the lone drop), I used the same feathered selection method, but instead set the background color to the desired shade and use the delete function to fill the entire feathered selection. That worked much better, but the blood looks too velevety, I think. I guess the difference between what I made and wet-looking blood is in the highlights, but I never took an art class. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.