Wednesday, April 06, 2022

R279 Mock Georgian House - Part 2. Painting bricks.

 

Dry brush painting

I'm not sure why I chose to dry-brush the bricks on this model rather than using pencil crayons. I think it might produce a more consitent colour appropriate for a new build property, or maybe just for variety. 

Work starts with a thin coat of Humbrol 121 for the mortar colour left overnight to harden. I didn't aim for a perfect covering as I hope the variety of shades in the base will produce some variance in the final brick colours. It's a bit like the "pre-shading" techniques military modellers use. 

This has worked well. Combined with a less then perfect brick colour, there are variations, yet I've only used two colours, or three if we count the brick colour plastic. I'm sure there are more sophisticated methods, but 85% or the result for 20% of the effort sounds like a good trade-off to me. 

When dry-brushing, the advice it to wipe the paint off the brush on a rag or bit of kitched towel. I don't do this, I wipe it off on the corner of my modelling board. And have been doing for many, many years. 

This mound of paint and glue used to facinate a previous BRM editor who I suspect had dreams of removing it from the board and cutting through it to reveal all the layers. Maybe I'll do that one day myself, but it would seem a shame to ruin the mound. I'm thinking the result would be a rather dreary version of Fordite

Using the mound, I can pick up more paint from where I've worked it off the brush, so I'm sure it's more economic this way. It works for me anyway.

No comments: