Painting an HO Scale Brick Building - Part 3

As I was trying to wrap up this simple brick storefront, which was just supposed to serve as a backdrop for the HO scale miniatures I have been working on. It struck me that I really should try and get some white or off white into the mortar lines. I have never been particularly successful with this technique in the past and I was trying to avoid it on this one. However, there is a lot of brick buildings coming down the line and its a technique that I need to master.

I have been looking at different techniques for a while now on various platforms and I just didn't like what I was seeing. There must be another way to go about this that would be relatively quick and yet still look good from a reasonable viewing distance. My eyes were wandering across my shelf of paint supplies when I spotted the box of Liquitex Acrylic Inks. Now that had possibilities.

I grabbed the titanium white, raw sienna, raw umber and burnt umber bottles to see what I could do. I took the white and put a few drops on the palette and then added just a bit of raw sienna to get something not quite white. I didn't thin it at all and just painted across a brick segment that I had from ITLA Scale Models. This is the same piece that I had used to practice the brick painting technique that I used on the small brick store. I wiped off the ink right away and it looked pretty good. Anytime you add white or something almost white to a surface and wipe it away you are, essentially, creating faded look and that's what I got. It looked pretty good. I then took the raw sienna and painted it lightly across the top of the surface to kill a bit of the faded look and that restored the color and didn't seep down in to the mortar lines. I did the same with a bit of raw umber just to see how it looked and the effect was looking pretty good.

To help blend things back together I took some Pan Pastel Burnt Sienna and Burnt Sienna Shade and lightly rubbed it down the surface and it worked as I had hoped, blending the colors together but it did fill in some of the mortar lines as well. Pretty quick and dirty.

I tried the ink on the brick store and was less successful there, the enamel wash came back to haunt me at this point. The Dark Track wash from Ammo dries fairly glossy and the ink ended up being pretty hydrophobic, pretty much staying on the surface or beading in the mortar lines. I cleaned it up with the same raw sienna and raw umber ink and it cleaned it up pretty good, restoring some color and still keeping a bit of that faded look.

So time to try it on something from "scratch". The rest of the ITLA kit (+a module or two I think) was sitting there. It was primed and ready to go. But more on that in another post.

Here is where the brick store has ended up at this point. I have probably missed some steps but its looking pretty good. I have started redoing the roof, it wasn't coming along the way I had hoped so I washed again with the Dark Track wash and that has been drying for a couple of days now. I'm going to back over it with an oil technique and see how that goes.

From the front, you can pick out some of the white mortar lines and see some of the peeling paint in the windows and door.

I'm liking the variation in color that I'm seeing now. After the white ink mortar lines went on and I "refreshed" some of the fading it caused it gives a more natural look to the building.

Quite pleased with the chipping on the white, not so much the door and window.

And the blank wall with the missing door. I think that's actually supposed to be an iron bean not a stone block supporting the bricks above the door. Oh well.,