Tutorial: Painting Brick Walls

Recently I've painted a model of The Monarch Theatre for the Multiverse Gaming webstore showcase, and decided to share with you a method I use for painting old brick on lasercut buildings. While it is very simple to get the brick texture on some other materials (plasticard, decorflex etc.), laser-engraved brickwork may seem a bit more challenging, as the depth of the recesses between the bricks is really small compared to other materials. While I've seen some great looking lasercut brick buildings (big shout-out to Jack Glanfield and his winter Gotham table here!), many people seem to either leave their models bare or paint them with a single shade of red/pink/orange. Hopefully after reading this step-by-step tutorial you will find it much easier to get that old brickwork look on your MDF or HDF buildings!

Materials and Tools
- sponge (blister foam works perfectly)
- wide flat brush
- airbrush (optional)

Paints
- grey acrylic primer
- VMC 137 Cavalry Brown
- VMC 135 Beige Brown
- VMC 027 Orange Red
- Army Painter Strong Tone
- Vallejo Game Color Wash: Pale Grey

 Click on the pictures to see the bigger version.

1. Priming

Spray paint your model with a grey acrylic spray. Try to be thorough, but don't worry if there's some bare MDF/HDF showing.

2. Stippling

Tear a small bit of blister foam, get some VMC Cavalry Brown on it and start stippling - you need just a tiny amount of paint to be on the sponge. Cover a better part of each wall, so it looks roughly like this:

The whole building after the first layer of stippling.

Repeat the stippling with Beige Brown, trying to fill up the grey areas with color.

Fill up the grey areas further with VMC Orange Red.

3. Rubbing
Get all three paints you have used until now ready. You will switch between each of them several times for the next step.
Leave very small amount of paint on the sponge (almost like for a drybrushing) and rub it on the wall with the sponge:

Just smear it across the bricks.

 4. Washing
Now we will bring out that brick texture with a bit of wash. Take a wide flat brush and use it to get some Game Color Pale Grey wash on the wall:

Move the brush from the top to the bottom first (to get the wash into the horizontal lines between the bricks) and across the wall after that, go get it into vertical recesses. Movement from the top to the bottom of the wall will also give an illusion of old streaks on the brickwork.

Tip: if you feel there's too much wash left on the surface of the wall, just rub it further into the recesses with your finger, clean your brush and go back to washing the walls as before.

5. Shading

Once again using a wide flat brush, put some streaks of Army Painter Strong Tone on the wall. You may also want to add some dark shading where the cornerstones, cornices etc. are by airbrushing those places with a bit of black paint.

 Finished!