Detailing Brick Buildings

The next detail we're gonna add to the buildings is perhaps the fussiest detail of all. It's the most painstaking detail and it's a little bit of drudgery. However, it's those little tiny details that can make a huge difference in the appearance of a building. What we're gonna be doing is coloring some individual bricks here and there on the sides of the wall of our building. Now, if you don't think that makes much of a difference. Take a look at these shots here these are some of the buildings on my layout. And as you can see just adding slightly different colored bricks here and there kind of adds a certain dimension to the walls. It makes the walls really stand out, it makes the walls look very, very much more realistic. Now to do this we're gonna be using two different colors of paint on this particular building. You can use only one if you choose. Two actually makes it look a little bit better. And what we're gonna do is start with the base color of our walls. Which in my case is Box Car Red and I added one drop of white to 5 drops of Box Car Red. And then to make the darker color I added one drop of black to 5 drops of Box Car Red. And what we've got here is our darker color of brick and our lighter color of brick. We're gonna be using two different very, very fine brushes to do this. And again, what you want to do is pick random bricks and just lightly touch them. They don't have to be exact, you don't have to go around the perimeter of each of the bricks. You're just going for the effect of different colored bricks. So let's start out with the lighter color here. Just get a little bit of the paint in there. And what we're gonna do is just touch some of these bricks like so just randomly like that. And you saw that very, very first one that I put on I had a little bit too much paint on the brush. So we just paint some random bricks here and there. Don't hesitate to put two light colored bricks or dark bricks next to one another. You can see that's starting to add a bit of dimension to the walls already. It makes them look not quite so monotone. And the reason that we're doing this now and not earlier is because there's no reason to really put these different color bricks underneath the sign that we painted on here. One of the things you need to really pay attention to when you're doing this is not to do too may of these bricks. Because you'll wind up with a wall that kind of looks polka-dotted. And that's not what you want. Just randomly here and there. Just pick out a brick with your eye color it. And then we'll do the same thing. We can do a couple of more light ones. Little bit too much paint on there. And again if you do get a little bit too much paint on there and it blobs a little bit you're really not gonna notice it because of the effect of the whole wall. And you can see just that one drop of white in the brick color makes a noticeable difference. But as they dry they will dry a little bit darker. So the effect isn't quite so polka-dotty. Now let's go in with the darker color. Do the same thing, make sure we don't have too much paint on there. Find some random bricks. Paint those. As I said early this is not the most fun job in the world. This is a little bit of drudgery. But it's kind of a painful process that really makes a difference in the way the final wall will appear. And again what we're going for is those outstanding buildings not those average buildings so. Talking a little extra time, taking a little extra care, doing a little bit more detail work. Let's put some in the header above the window here. Can really make a difference in the way the building looks. And that is about as much as I want to put on this wall, because again you don't want it to get polka-dotty. And that's enough. And you can see that makes a whole lot of difference in the way the wall looks. So what I'm going to do now is take my two different colors of paint, I'll take the rest of the walls here and I will add those bricks, add those colored bricks to the wall. And again you can see as this is drying it's drying a little bit more subtle than it looks when the paint is wet. So let's do the rest of the building and then get on with one more detail before we actually start assembling the building.