Painting a Faux Brick Wall

How I painted faux brick walls in the Man cave:

I wanted an industrial warehouse looking wall and I wanted a white washed look.  I like the gray and white, so I chose Black and White paint – That’s it!  Best part, all of the paint was left over from other projects so it was essentially free!

 

Our basement walls were poured using a form that made the walls look like brick, so all I had to do was paint them!

Step 1 – paint all exposed concrete walls white.  I had plenty of paint for this, thanks to the builder leaving a 5 gallon bucket of white primer, Thanks Kyle!  As you can see, I wasn’t too worried about getting it in all the cracks and crevices, I knew I would be adding more paint later.

Step 2 – randomly choose some bricks to be painted black.

Step 3 – I used a dry brush technique to lighten the black and darken the white – so my concrete wall started to look like a painted brick wall.  As I said before all I used was black and white paint.

To dry brush (barley dip your brush tip in the paint and dab it on the wall) I added white paint to the black bricks and covered it in until I achieved the color I wanted

 

Then using the same brush, I lightly dipped it into the black paint and I dry brushed it on the white bricks to add various tones of gray.  I repeated this process until the wall was covered. By alternating between the black and white paint as you go, it gives you various colors of gray.

The process was time consuming and messy,  but easy.  You don’t have to be exact, just have fun with it.  If you get a little out of control you can always go back and clean up your lines with a quick swipe of white paint.  The part I love the most about this process – if I think it is too dark, I keep adding dry brush white to lighten it up!  You can see more pictures of the finished space here.

Supplies I used:

White paint

Black paint

Dry brush

Paint roller

Paint pan liner

P.S. – I love to paint, but hate cleaning brushes, rollers and paint pans.  My solution, I buy cheap brushes, rollers and paint pan liners and I throw it all away when I am finished with the project!  (if I don’t think I will finish the project the same day, I store my wet brushes in a zip lock bag)!