12/01/2013

Brick Wall Part 1





In this post I will make a start in showing how I decorated the outer wall of Miniature House. In reality the bricks are pieces of sanding paper, coloured with acrylic colours for artists.  It is an inexpensive way of decorating the outside of your house, but on the other hand it takes a lot of your time and patience too......
I made use of a technique that is shown in a book written by Beryl Armstrong:



In her book Beryl shows a way of cutting paper with  a self-made device to 1:12 brick-size. I did a few experiments with a variety of papers and paints before I decided on using sanding-paper with a medium grain and painting the paper myself using multiple layers of transparant colours.
I started with priming several sheets of the sanding paper with gesso:

 






I used a fairly rough brush and as you can see in the picture, I made a kind of stamping move with it to create even more texture than is already in the grain of the paper. I let it dry thoroughly.



Next, I took some burnt sienna and covered all the sheets with this colour, applying it unevenly so as to keep the surface lively ; sometimes really watery, sometimes using a thicker substance.





So far the first part of my brick-wall-making.  In the next post, I'll show you how I coloured and cut all sheets of sanding paper.