um.. yeah Kismet is nice, but its not a substitute for uscript. Its more like a "lite" version for whats most used in level design and machinima. If you want to go the particle effect route, which might be the easiest and potentially only way to go without coding something, you can use kismet to spawn a particle of your…
Further addition on more reading: Looks like decals can project on skeletal meshes. So you may want to look into decal creation via Material Instance Time Varying. Still going to need some script hooks for the full effect though.