Brick Walls ~ Friday, September 18, 2020

I'm getting back into model building, and my first new project is a Life-Like Downtown Hotel kit that's been sitting on my shelf for a while.

I seem to still remember how to cut, sand, and glue plastic kits together.

But one thing that's always been a challenge is painting brick buildings with believable-looking mortar lines, so I decided to take a closer look at what they look like in real life.

A possible benefit of the current lack of entertainment options (this was actually early in the pandemic, when things were really locked-down) is that kids are bored enough to help you with projects. When I asked Nate, "Wanna bike around town and take pictures of brick walls?" he said "Sure!"

So here's some selections from our survey:

Our chimney, circa 1950.

Actually a modern building. I watched them build it with big pre-fab panels of brick-colored tiles. Looks pretty realistic, though.

This, on the other hand, is the oldest building in Redwood City. There's a parking garage behind it now, but the back side used to face a creek, where merchandise was unloaded from boats.

An interesting building whith paint over the bricks, peeling away. Note that the purple section in the top picture is structurally part of this brick building, but seems to have been taken over by the one to the right.

A fairly nice and well-kept up office building downtown.

The Sequoia Hotel, a local architectural landmark which is stubbornly defying the gentrification of downtown.

One thing I learned from some discussion in the nscaletraction group on groups.io is that, although we stereotypically imagine mortar as white or grey, in earlier times it was often colored to match the bricks. The "1905" building shows this nicely.