Painting Faux Bricks

For when you absolutely, positively MUST have bricks, but let's face it, you're just not a mason...

there's always the FAUX brick option.  I had to paint this cube...

(remember my doorstop/table from last week?)

...and I didn't want it to look like the cubes from the last play, so I thought I'd paint some bricks on it. 

First, I got my lovely group of stage crew girls (I have a very small number of boys showing up, and they don't seem to like painting the way the girls do) to paint the whole cube grey. They did a great job - complete coverage and no paint on the floor.  They even washed the brushes and rollers until they were clean and able to be used again - already an improvement over last year!  The next day, during my lunch, I took the orignal grey and added some black for a darker version, and some white for a lighter version, and a dry bushed it on the whole thing here and there for accents.

Then stage crew met again, and I had another student tape a brick pattern with painter's tape over all the vertical sides.  Took her an hour and a half, the poor thing, but she stuck with it.  'ATTA GIRL!!

The next day at lunch, I rolled a brickish red over all of her taped areas.

Then I mixed some dark red (the same way I did with the grey) and dry brushed that on here and there...

 and then I did the same with some lighter red, (which looked suspiciously like pink...) and then let it all dry till this morning when one of my hard working stage crew girls took the tape off to reveal some decent looking faux bricks.

It looks a little bright in the picture, but I can't get hung up on that - it's done, and that's a good thing.  I only have about 800 more things to finish.  For some reason, when I thought of this covered in bricks, Sesame Street popped into my head (in the 70's you watched Sesame Street, and then switched to regular Saturday morning cartoons and Schoolhouse Rock when it came out - maybe that was the connection?).  Can't you picture Gordon or Maria doing a little dance on a cube like this one?