How to Paint Bricks on Textured Walls With a Roller and Brush

7 Materials
$60
20 Hours
Medium
Brighten old brick walls, color vinyl imitation brick panels, or bring life to stamped concrete with this easy roll-on paint technique for accents walls.
This is an easy and fun project that you can do to give a room the warmth of a realistic vintage brick wall. And it helps to be a little bit messy!
The corner of this room started out dull, moon gray. We knew that the stamped concrete had a lot of potential to look great. With a little help from warm colors, a roller and some brushes, walls with brick textures can be refreshed and made to match your favorite décor.
Here's a close up of our faux brick accent wall. The base of this wall is stamped concrete, but this technique will work on imitation brick panels and go a long way toward hiding the seams where the panels meet. You can also use this technique to re-color a real brick wall.
Here's how the room looked before.
Here are the three colors of flat latex we used for the brick background. Semi-gloss will work as well, and you can mix flat and semi-gloss together for this decorative process.
These three colors blended together in big random patches make for some very nice brick tones:• Bittersweet orange• Purple plum• Milk chocolate brown
Step one is rolling the orange straight onto the bricks. 95% coverage is fine. If you are worried about peeling, we recommend tinted Kilz Complete Coat which comes in many colors. Eight-ounce sizes are available too, from Walmart OnLine.
Our orange paint grabbed fast and began to dry within seconds. We had to wet ours with water so that we could blend in both the purple and brown shades. You can paint right over to mortar lines and allow drips. You'll paint over those later. Make big messy patches of your colors. Blend, splatter, dab … all these techniques will work because real bricks are often mottled.
When the purple and brown have dried a bit, roll a second light coat of the orange on top. Use a flat roller so that you will be making highlights of orange on the brick texture. Blend a bit, or wipe with a baby wipe.
Use yellow, white, and brown chalk paints to create the mortar lines. We filled in our mortar with a 3/8ths inch brush with a round tapered end. Sweep the color into the crevices. We used mostly brown with white and yellow highlights here and there. White alone was too glaring for the antique brick look we prefer.
Now for some pop! Use 3-4 bright craft paint colors, like Apple Barrel Neon Orange, Flamingo Coral, and Tapestry Wine to accent some of the bricks. This will bring real life and a bit of glamour into a surface that might otherwise look dull.
Our paints dried rock hard and will not scrape off of our concrete walls, but if your accent walls will get a lot of wear and tear, be sure to use a good matte sealer. Semi-gloss will also work. We like CoverSeal Professional Grade which we get at Amazon.
And that's it! We timed this project a one minute per square foot for the background colors; and one minute per square foot for the mortar lines. We did 1750 square feet all together.
Next we painted the dull concrete floor to look like green marble tile! We'll be sharing tips on how to make this durable, flaw-hiding finish in our next video. Be sure to follow us here on HomeTalk, and check our web site for free beautiful printables and crafts for your home. --Stephie.
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Stephie McCarthy
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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Frequently asked questions
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  2 questions
  • Norma Sheehan Norma Sheehan on Jan 21, 2020

    Could you do this on a cement pad small patio? If so how could you protect it from weather? It is not a covered area.

  • Cheryl H Cheryl H on Feb 12, 2020

    Any suggestions for painting a brick fireplace?

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  • Johanne Palange Johanne Palange on Jan 22, 2021

    I love it! I love it! I love it! Brick that actually looks like brick. Warm, inviting, cozy look. I have no bricks but I want to do it!

  • Trudy Trudy on Jan 23, 2021

    Bought all my supplies today. I’m doing it on 4 poured brick walls in my basement

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