Painting Faux Bricks
How to refresh brick-textured walls with paint
© Stephie McCarthy
We love the look of vintage brick walls like you might find in lofts, warehouses, or brownstones.
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If you've got old brick walls, painted brick walls, imitation brick panels, or stamped concrete walls (as we do) … and you'd love to freshen the color, here's how to do a faux-brick finish using a paint roller and a few brushes.
We experimented with latex paints on our stamped concrete walls and created very realistic brick colors. This is the result above.
The walls started out a dull, moon gray.
We thought about painting them white, but all those crevices were sure to get dusty and be hard to keep looking fresh.
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We timed this faux finish at one minute per square foot to roll and brush the base colors.
And … one minute per square foot to paint the mortar off-white. Not bad! It was finished in a few days.
1,725 square feet of wall space, all together. And … you have permission to be messy. Messy makes for realistic bricks!
Remember, you can use a damp baby-wipe to correct any mistakes.
Here are the three colors you can blend to make brick accent walls like ours.
Colors
The three colors of latex we used were bittersweet orange, purple plum, and milk chocolate brown, in flat finish. Semi-gloss will work as well, or you can mix flat and semi-gloss paints. We used "oops" paints which had been returned to the store and discounted.
We learned as we went along that these three colors when overlapped in places, made great brick tones.
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Step one: roll walls with the bittersweet orange. Don't worry if paint gets into the mortar lines. You'll color these later. Use a flat roller and don't worry if your coverage is uneven. Shoot for 95% coverage with the orange. If your orange dries very quickly as our did, wet with water and a brush.
Don't worry about drips, just use a drop cloth.
Step two: While the orange paint is still wet, use a 2.5" angled nylon brush to blend in patches of plum and milk chocolate in random shapes. Color outside the lines!Later, when you've painted the mortar, the bricks will take shape, but for now, spread your colors without regard to the shape of the bricks.
Use your brush to fill in where the roller missed. This is where an angled brush really helps.
We found our tough brushes in the craft section at Walmart.
Step three: roll on the orange … again. Roll lightly to create orange highlights. Use a dry flat 2.5" brush to feather the highlights into the previous color layers.
Step four:
When the wall has dried a bit, use a 1" brush and 3 or 4 bright colors of craft paint to create accent bricks. We used neon orange, wine red, and coral. These hot colored bricks really add beauty. Choose your favorite shades.
If they don't match well, wipe them off, and try another shade.
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When the wall has dried, use the above colors of chalk paint and paint the mortar with a round 3/8ths inch brush. We found that white was too glaring. We painted ours milk chocolate, with random streaks of off white and faded yellow.
If CoverSeal is unavailable, use a good alternative in matte or semi-gloss
Our walls will not come into contact with much wear and tear, but if yours will, invest in a good sealer.
We use CoverSealfrom Amazon, in a matte finish on our concrete projects, though it may be temporarily unavailable (check back). Use a good alternative product if you can't find CoverSeal in either matte or semi-gloss.
Covering these walls with fresh new color has made an enormous difference in this space.
The dull gray is gone!
Except in the laundry room! We'll freshen those brick panels another day!
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