Making Bricks from Vacuum Formed Plastic
Health and Safety - bricks are very heavy and it important to make sure your wearing appropriate footwear. The vacuum form gets very hot so you should make sure to be careful what your touching and also that your well educated on how to use it.
- Vacuum form
- Plastic sheet
- Bricks
- Paint
- Variety of paint brushes
This is a very common way to create textures in the industry as its cheap, easy to paint and very lightweight. This brick effect was made by laying bricks into the vacuum form and pressing the plastic over the top. To stop the plastic from going all the way round the bricks, we only pressed the sheet of plastic down slightly so it only picked up the top surface. Using the air gun, the plastic was pushed off of the bricks.
After letting the plastic cool, I began to paint the bricks. I had a reference image off the internet so I could see the colours that I wanted to recreate. Then working with really watery paint mixes, I layered up colour until my bricks looked right. The colours I used were burnt umber, burnt sienna, raw umber and raw sienna as these are very warm brick colours. After letting my watery washes dry, I went in with a dry brush to add more depth and texture to the bricks. Once again this was left to dry and then I did a wash over the whole surface with burnt umber. This tied all the bricks together and took any white away. It also coloured the mortar nicely.
