How To Make A Partially Revealed Brick Tudor

When I shared my post with the Gingerbread Tudor, I showed two different ways to paint the Tudor house. I am still working on my post on how to make a cardboard gingerbread house, but have had one dismal fail (followed by a only partial success), and have found that it involves a lot of waiting for my paint and “icing” decoration to dry. I decided to make a fourth model of the house while I waited, this one with a partially revealed brick exterior. I hope to design more Tudor houses in the future and want to explore different ways of painting and decorating them. While I am going to use the Gingerbread Tudor pattern for my model, the same techniques can be used with any pattern.

During my quest for inspiration for the design of my first Tudor house, I saw a few pictures of very old real buildings with partially revealed brick exteriors and decided that I wanted to replicate the look. A warning though: this is more work and takes longer than the previous ways I decorated the Tudor. If you don’t want to take the time to stencil bricks like I did, you can use brick paper that you glue into your building. You can download the printable brick paper I used for my Old Ale House here, and the brick paper I used for my Train Station here.

Worn Tudor Wall, picture by Good Textures

I don’t come from a scrapbooking background. In addition, for the first 5 years of making miniature houses, I made them exclusively out of aluminum cans. Thus, sometimes it takes me a lot of trial and error and multiple attempts to achieve the results I want with a cardboard house. I don’t even always know all of the tools that might be available to help in decorating. I only recently discovered the many uses of glitter gel pens! So you might know of or discover other materials than what I use in my blog post. Let me know what has worked for you and I will add it to my post.

For general miniature house decorating ideas, I always suggest you check out Lucy Foxworth’s site Paper Glitter Glue. Plus, Lucy has free patterns for houses on her site too. Lucy has a pattern for a German half-timbered house that would work equally well for this technique, plus would look great in any holiday village. You may need to adjust the size of her file to fit in with the rest of your village as Lucy doesn’t design to any particular scale. I consider Lucy my mentor in all things miniature house related (except aluminum cans as that is my thing.) In fact, it was only after Lucy took an online Inkscape class and posted about it that I took the same class and learned to design SVG patterns for houses.

How To Make A Partially Revealed Brick Tudor House

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The Partially Revealed Brick Tudor House Specific Materials

My free pattern for The Gingerbread Tudor from the A Cottage in the Forest Library. Design #65. Get the password for free by filling out the form at the bottom of this page
A brick stencil. I used the Honey Bee Salvaged Bricks stencil as I liked that the stencil makes the brick look old.
Tim Holtz Distress Grit Paste and Tim Holtz Texture Paste. I use the grit paste to make the bricks and the texture paste to imitate the plaster infill. This makes my plaster on this model much rougher and older looking. If you want a smoother looking plaster, use texture paste to both stencil the bricks and as the plaster.
Plastic Spatula Palette Knife Set or metal palette knife for stenciling. I have both as I have found is some situations I like one over the other.
Brick colored acrylic paint. I have found two colors of paint that I think work well for old bricks, Craftsmart Brick Red and DecoArt Americana Heritage Brick. The Heritage Brick is slightly brighter in color than the Brick Red. I used the Brick Red for this model.
Removable vinyl or contact paper. I was out of both and didn’t want to go to the store so I used Cricut Transfer Tape and that worked fine too.
Metallic patterned Washi tape for trim. The particular washi tape I used can be found here. I had to cut it in half and trim it down a little to fit. I have since found narrower metallic patterned washi tape here.
Blue Painter’s Tape
Glass Cutting/ Crafting Mat. This is one of the things I recently noticed that Lucy recommends on her site and I don’t know how I did without it these last few years! Instead of painting and stenciling on multiple pieces of waxed paper, I use the mat and clean up afterwards with a disinfecting wipe. I bought mine at Michael’s with a 40% off coupon. Amazon does have a smaller, less expensive model if you don’t have room for the larger mat. Michael’s only caries the larger one.
Refer back to the Gingerbread Tudor blog post for the other general materials you will need to make the building.

Steps to Make The Partially Revealed Brick Tudor House

Download The Gingerbread Tudor pattern from A Cottage in the Forest library.
Import The Gingerbread Tudor pattern into your design software.
Cut out the pattern – I use my Cricut Maker. Texture if desired.
Fold the body of the building.
Stencil the brick areas onto the house.
Cover some of the brick with texture paste to imitate plaster. Paint
Glue on the timber frames, window frames and door. Attach vellum windows.
Glue together the body of the building.
Add the bottom insert.
Glue on the roof.
Add the steps, upper window roof, and chimney.

How To Make The Partially Revealed Brick Tudor House

Download The Gingerbread Tudor Pattern

Download The Gingerbread Tudor pattern from A Cottage in the Forest Library. It is design #65. Don’t forget to unzip it. The pattern is available in multiple formats – as a SVG (scalable vector graphics), DXF (drawing eXchange format), as a studio3 file for Silhouette, or as PDF file. I now include a 1″ square in with all of my SVG, DXF and Studio3 files. Scale the pattern so that the square is 1″ to make the building in the size it was designed. Of course the wonderful thing about SVG files is that you can easily scale them to make your building whatever size you would like.

Choose between whether you want a regular back with the light hole at the bottom of the building (this is the option I make below) or if you want to use the Putz Back and Bottom, where the light hole is in the back of the building.

Import The Gingerbread Tutor Pattern Into Design Software

As of this blog post, a Cricut Design Space update in 2021 broke the attached score and draw lines. You will need to go through the pattern in Design Space and change the score and draw lines to Score and Draw and then attach them to their object. I am still designing so that if someday Design Space fixes their problem, score lines and drawings import as actual score lines and drawings attached to their object, though I have pretty much lost hope of that ever happening.

Here is a great tutorial from Jennifer Maker’s website on attaching score lines. I have started making all of my score lines red so that you can tell that they are intended to be score lines.

Cut out all of your cardboard or Kraft Board pieces using my pattern. Cut a second set of the Timbers out of the removable vinyl.

Refer to the PDF I included with the SVG pattern for the name of each of the pieces you need to cut out.

Fold the Body of the Building

Fold each of the body pieces towards the back or inside (mountain folds) except for the one valley fold on each of the sides.

Paint the body of your building with whichever color you want to show through as the grout of the bricks. Let dry.

Add the removable vinyl timber pieces to each of the body pieces, smoothing down so they stick well. You may need to adjust them slightly to make sure they are lying where they need to. You can use your cardboard timber pieces to confirm this.

Cover the doors, windows, and tabs with blue painter’s tape or scraps of the removable vinyl.

Stencil the grit paste bricks onto each of the four body pieces. Use the edge of your palette knife to make the stenciling as level as possible. These building were made by plastering over brick or stone, so you want a brick base everywhere you won’t have timber to trim. I also stenciled my brick chimney at the same time.

Let the grit paste dry out so that is is still pliable but NOT all the way, or you will have difficulty removing the grit paste from your stencil. There is no exact time for this. It needs to dry out just enough that it maintains it shape. If you have a new jar of grit paste like I did it may be extra wet and take longer to reach that stage. You can see I am stenciling on my new glass mat. Cleanup was a breeze!

After all 4 pieces have been stenciled, but once again before the grit paste is thoroughly dry, remove the painter’s tape and removable vinyl timber mask. If you wait until the grit paste is thoroughly dry you will probably have to use your craft knife to help you pull off the vinyl without removing any of the bricks. Let your stenciled piece dry thoroughly. You can paint on the still wet grit paste, but you may mess up your bricks if you do so.

Now paint bricks in the areas where you want them to be revealed. In some small areas all of the plaster may have fallen away. In larger areas, only some of it.

Once the brick paint is dry, use your texture paste to fill in the remaining brick areas. This will be your “plaster.” I found the metal palette knife worked best here.

Once the texture paste is dry, take your cardboard timber pieces and lay them over your brick and plaster work. You may need to trim or remove a little of your grit paste with your craft knife if it is in any of the timber areas. You may even need to add more texture paste in areas.

Paint your plaster, slopping over slightly into the timber areas.

You will note that by stenciling the bricks, then adding the texture paste as the plaster, the plaster on this model is much rougher and older looking than the plaster of my Gingerbread Tudor models where I used only texture paste.

Glue on the Timber Frames, Window Frames and Door. Attach Vellum Windows.

Paint the timber trim, roofs and steps. I used a technique called dry brushing to get the timber look. You can either lay down a lighter layer, then add a touch of several different darker colors with a stiff paintbrush from which you remove most of the paint by brushing it on scrap paper first. Or you can do it in reverse, laying down the darker color and adding touches of lighter colors. Glue the timbers onto the building pieces.

Glue on the window trim, the doors, and the crossbars onto the doors.

Glue the vellum in place if you are using it. I colored several of the panes with glitter gel pens to give them a stained glass look.

Glue Together the Body of the House

Since the side walls fold outwards, I glue the bottom part of the sides to the front and back, wait until the glue has dried, then glue together the upper portion of the walls.

Add the Bottom Insert

Check the fit of the bottom insert piece, adjusting any of the fold lines as necessary. You may need to trim the corners. Glue in the bottom insert piece now as it will help to help to stiffen and square the walls of the building.