A Weathered Old Wall

I have now completed painting the wall and gates. I had envisaged doing a step-by-step set of photos for this but in reality I didn't get a chance to take the photos as I got carried away and just kept going... I'll do my best to explain the process I adopted for the brickwork but as an artistic process, I may have forgotten some of the stages!

Firstly, the finished result:

In essence, the process involved:

• Grey Primer,
• A wash of black-grey to darken the base colour,
• Mortar colours - sand/beige mixes applied diluted and in different layers to create variety of colour and density over the surface,
• Brick colours - Army Painter 'tanned flesh' and Vallejo 'flat earth' plus some other shades, mixed and applied in a dry-brushed fashion to pick out the brick faces
• Additional colouring to the bricks using pencil crayons
• Washes of brown and black-grey to tone down the colours, the darker colour being applied more heavily in the mortar lines at the base of the wall.

The stages using the brick colours and pencil crayons were repeated a few times as the washes tended to dull the additional colours from the crayons and a few corrections had to be made. Despite sanding down the brick faces prior to painting the mortar lines were still quite deep (and wide) and the pencil crayons actually helped pick out the edges of the bricks in places. The final dry-brush was a light green-grey on the lower brick courses to represent where greenery/grass had stained the brickwork. It rises on the rear of the wall as the landform of the layout rises behind the wall. 

The gates were painted in the same olive brown as the office building with similar weathering. The hinges were masked up and picked out in black-grey on both the gates and the walls. 

In place on the layout there is now some infill between the road and the walls, to raise the land a little and give a slightly deeper slot to site the wall in. Around the rear can be seen the slight correction that I had to make - I had over-estimated the height and extent of the raised landform and created a much too large expanse of darkened brickwork and mortar. I re-dry-brushed the bricks in this area and the effect of the darkened mortar is quite pleasing. There will be a lot of vegetation hiding all this in due course, I probably could have left it as it was...

The capping stones were painted in the same sand/beige colours as the mortar, having carefully masked off the brickwork first. The usual washes of brown and black-grey followed, then dry-brushing with the original colours. Everything was matt varnished to complete, which knocked back any shine from the pencil crayons. 

The picture above shows the various attempts at tree location - the one bottom right is the one that works best, bringing the tree closer to the wall and office but not overhanging too far.

Whilst I hadn't planned to complete these items before doing any more actual scenic work, having them available will allow for progress to now focus on the fun, messy bits...

Colin