Hello all. I make miniatures and one of the biggest pains in the butt is making brick textures. In the past, I would usually draw lines onto foam board with a dull pencil to simulate the look of brick (then texture the foam with a foil ball). On my last diorama, I decided to try cutting the brick pattern into EVA foam. This worked well for the scale I was doing - 1:24. I think the mortar lines would be too big for smaller scales, due to the size of the kerf, but I haven’t experimented yet.
I used a cut setting of speed 500/power 15 to ‘cut’ the bricks, which gave me nice, deep mortar lines without going all the way through the 2mm craft foam. I cut out the outlines with settings speed 400/power 80.
Normally I would heat the EVA with my heat gun and use a foil ball to texture. I didn’t want to do that in this case because the cut lines in EVA will widen when you apply heat. So instead, I beat the heck out of the foam with a BBQ brush, my foil ball and a toothpick.!
After the texturing, I stippled watered down texture paste onto the walls, painted them, weathered them with a black wash and did one final application of watered down texture paste to simulate mortar.
Have you looked at http://spiralgraphics.biz/ww_overview.htm It talks about wood but does terrific brick as well. In particular you can create seamless rough brick in grayscale, and 3d engrave it into wood or acrylic or whatever that would be way faster and more flexible in design, plus stronger if needed.
I don’t know why I didn’t think to try that. I usually stick my 2mm to a piece of ply with repositionable adhesive anyway. I’ll give that a go. Thanks!
I think of engraving as more like 3d printing. None of them complain about how they cannot get a large print in under 3 min and for the same reason
It would probably take longer to do a similar job by hand. Alternatively, you can invert the grays, and cut thick acrylic, and press out that brick design in foam in 30 seconds each as many as you want.
