Brick By Brick

Several people expressed an interest in the fireplace wall in yesterday's entry. So I decided to whip a tutorial up for doing it.

It is really a simple process. It's kind of hard on the fingers pressing down on the exacto knife. Other than that it's pretty straightforward.

You will need a piece of textured mat board the size of the wall or floor that you want to cover. You can see in the photo that the mat board isn't smooth. It almost makes the photo look fuzzy. You can pick this up at a framing shop or an art supply store. Sometimes the framers will sell you their scraps cheaply. I cut this to size before I start. That way if you want to put a border on it or some other design element you will know just how it is going to look when finished. For the bricks I used a t-square and marked the bricks 1/4" X 3/4".

For the stone, I just freehand them. You could use a photo and copy if you don't think that you can do it otherwise. There are sites all over the net with examples.

You will need paint in a shade for the brick and one for the mortar. I used Red Tile for the brick and Mudstone for the mortar on the sample. I also did a sample of stone. That was done with Mudstone, Toffee Brown and Trail Tan for the mortar and some highlights on the stones.

In the first two photos you will see that I smeared the mat board with paint. I didn't give it an even coat.

Next I took a very sharp exacto knife and started carving a V shaped trench between the bricks/stones. It is important to do each line in one stroke pressing down firmly. That's where the tired fingers come in. You can do short parts of the curved lines. I try to do the long ones all at once. You will use several blades before you are finished.

I thought I got photos of this step when I finished. Oops! missed. You can see the results in the next photo tho. I advise you to do exactly what I did here. Find some scraps of textured mat board and practice before you try to do a serious finished wall or floor.

In this photo you will see the cuts. After I did the cutting I wet a paper towel to have at hand and scrubbed the mortar paint in the cracks, going over the whole thing in this case. If you were doing a larger floor you would have to do it a section at a time. It dries pretty quickly.

On the one with the rocks I went over all of the lines with the larger end of a ball stylus to soften the corners. I put some texture in the rocks with the stylus and with the end of a pointed stylus. These rocks are more like flagstones than river rocks. I did a bit of dry brushing on both the rocks and the bricks after this step.

It takes some patience and some practice to get the bricks/tile/rocks/slate looking right. The floor on the left is in Eskiaga's Southwestern room box. After I got it looking the way I wanted it, I took it outside and gave it a couple of coats of Deft spray satin varnish. This has been around for about 15 years. It still looks good.

This is the slate floor of the Witches' Warehouse. It was done the same way, including the spray varnish. I did it the way I did the rocks in the sample. Stylus after cutting and grouting.

This is really a handy dandy technique to have in your mini vocabulary. It costs very little and with practice you can turn out all kinds of walls and flooring. Did I mention that you can do bathroom tile with it too?

I only have 3 words for you. Practice, practice, practice. Oh! And have fun!!!

See you tomorrow.