What colour for bricks.

[Tarps]

Hi can anyone point me in the right direction of a base colour I should use on my brick low relief workshop building.
I only use acrylic paints to paint with, any advice will be appreciated.:thumb2:

[KarlW]

Bricks vary a bit in colour, but a dark orangey red is pretty common, pick out random ones in a slighty different shade.

[Tim Marlow]

Brick colours are many and varied I’m afraid, depending upon the area and the period of manufacture. Victorian London, for example, tendEd to be yellow, Manchester are darker red. My old home town, Salisbury, had and orangey red brick. There are also engineering blue where weight bearing is required. When you pick a colour, paint the mortar first, then dry brush diagonally with required colour. Painting individual bricks is a recipe for the nut house.....

[Tarps]

Thanks guys for the information, most useful. :thumb2:

[dave]

Brick Red

i will fetch my coat.

[KarlW]

Brick Red

i will fetch my coat.

There are a few ranges that actually do a "brick red".......so you may stay.

[Tarps]

I seem to favour Vallejo acrylic paints so I think I will go with their brick red and weather it to get the desired colour on the building.

[Guest]

Pick a colour you think is right — as said, it varies widely with era, area and more. Paint the whole wall in that colour and then mix up variations on it: just put a bit of the paint on a palette and add in the odd drop of some other colour to make it darker, lighter and/or a different shade, then paint random (groups of) bricks with it. A little goes a long way, though: what you want to achieve is to break up the monotony, not make bricks stand out by being clearly different colours. If you do the latter, you soon get the appearance of a new-built house intended to look old by using a few different colours of brick.

After that, drybrushing and wiping dark paint vertically up and down over the wall with your finger helps a lot in making the wall appear more realistic.

[Tarps]

Thanks Jakko for the information and explaining this to me.

[Guest]

Let me share this as an example of what I mean:

[ATTACH]401495[/ATTACH]

This is one of the Airfix 1:76 scale resin buildings that I painted some years ago as a piece of wargames terrain (hence the plastic card floor I put in). The walls are mainly a generic brick red, I think from Revell. I then painted areas of bricks with two or three different shades of red that came close to the base colour but weren’t quite the same, and then drybrushed bits with a few other shades as well. The mortar is simply a wash of grey paint over all of that. The staining near the door and window is black paint that I smeared downward with my finger while it was still wet (in retrospect, I should also have done that underneath the roof supports).

[Tarps]

Looks really good Jakko, thanks for sharing this with me.:thumb2:

[Guest]

I hope it’ll prove useful to you It doesn’t need to be complicated or a lot of work to look good, is what I guess I’m trying to say Just a few colours and some simple techniques, and your wall will look a lot more interesting.

[Guest]

Kevin, have a look at Google Photos for brick. Jakko is right in his posting .
I've included a photo I took a few years ago of some Victorian brick



You can see the odd blue bricks that were laid.

I've photoed theses for you from the Master of Dios. Emmanuel Nouaillier.



I refer to this all the time. HTHS

John.

[Tarps]

Thanks John for the reference pictures.

[Guest]

That series in MilMod that John posted an installment of there, is a very good read if you want realistic-looking buildings, roads, street furniture and similar.