Controlled Uni-Directional Spatter Painting

For the outside walls out the building, I wanted the appearance of common brick, which is not one color, but has large blotches of colors ranging from buff through oxide red to almost black.  Hand-coloring individual bricks to achieve this effect was out of the question.  I needed to find a faster way.

The object was to start with the walls a solid base color, then spatter the brick surfaces with droplets of paint large enough to be seen, but not so large that they'd cover more than two bricks.  In HO, that's a fairly narrow range of size.

I got the results I sought by putting a square of Nylon mesh curtain material (Tulle is too coarse) in an embroidery hoop, brushing paint onto the mesh, and using an small nozzle (a basketball needle with the end cut off) on my air compressor to blow the paint, a little at a time, from the mesh to the walls.  It seemed to work best with the nozzle about an inch behind the mesh.  Try this on a sheet of paper first.  If you include grimy black among your spatter colors, do the floor with grimy black spatters too.  Floors in shops tend to get that way after a while.

When doing special effects like this, make sure you include all the pieces you are going to use, and treat them all the same, so you don't have to go back and duplicate the treatment for a piece you missed.  Don't forget the pieces that face the roof.

Tips:

• Hang the parts on an upright surface.  I hot-glued cardboard from a cereal box to the back of an unneeded piece of paneling, for a hook to go through the windows.
• Use a wide range of colors.  (See below.)
• Start with the light colors.
• Over-do the first colors you use, because some of those dots will be covered up by later colors.
• I had an assistant when I did this.  She brushed the paint onto the mesh, and managed the paint bottles, while I did the spattering and kept track of which parts had been done.  I don't see how I could have managed without her.

The technique worked pretty well, but the colors I used (mixtures of rust, roof brown, brick red) were too dark and too close to each other in color, and the effect was mostly lost when I applied the weathering.  When you pick your colors, remember you are trying to reproduce the color of clean brick.  The dirt comes later, during the weathering.

Credit where it's Due Department: My first-grade teacher taught us how to "spatter paint" by applying poster paint to an old toothbrush and using something, maybe our thumbs, to stroke the brush and flip the paint onto the paper.  It produced a nice pebbly sort of texture, but I never figured out whether I was supposed to stroke toward me or toward the paper, as an equal amount of paint seemed to go in each direction either way.  Thank you, Miss Letterer, where ever you are!