How to Make 1:12 Scale Bricks

Bricks made form paper clay

For my Tudor dolls house I needed to make a large brick chimney and brick infill in a herringbone pattern  for above and below the front windows.That's a lot of bricks!
  I started by making the bricks out of sandpaper. First, I painted a sheet of sandpaper in several swirls of different coloured browns. Then, on the back of the sandpaper, I marked out horizontal lines then divided them vertically into the correct scale brick sizes. I cut them out with a craft knife.
  Once I had a pile of little bricks, I mixed them all up and stuck them one by one in a herringbone pattern in the divisions below the windows. They looked okay, but I thought I could do better to make them look really realistic.
   So I used paper clay. Shown in the photograph here is the bottom part of the chimney. I made a wooden form, rolled out the paper clay like you roll out pastry, covered the wooden form with PVA glue and gently pressed the paper clay onto it.
   While the paper clay was still a little damp, I used the edge of a metal ruler to mark out the horizontal lines. Then I used the blade of a craft knife to mark the vertical lines. It didn't matter that not all the bricks were exactly the same size as in Tudor times the bricks would have been hand made.
   Once the paper clay was dry, I painted the bricks using watercolour paints in shades of burnt sienna, Paynes grey and ochre. This gave a variegated effect, and, with the texture of the paper clay, the chimney looks just like the real thing!