Ways To Paint Brick
by Genevre
If you have brick around a fireplace or one of your walls is brick and you are looking for a way to update the look. Here are a few different styles you can paint it:
Solid Color Paint – You can just pick a color and paint it with a solid color with a brush. I’ve done this before in a house we remodeled and I painted the brick white. It looked fine and went with the decor. But, now, after experimenting with so many other styles of painting since then, I would go for another look that accentuates instead of covering up the texture of the bricks.
Whitewashing – With this technique, you would paint the bricks a solid color, but you would water down the paint first. You can do a half and half mixture of paint and water, but actually, I would start with a small mixture of 3/4 water and 1/4 paint and slowly do small tests, adding a little more paint, until you get the transparency in the paint that you want. You can use regular latex wall paint (100% acrylic is best), I’ve used it before on brick and it turned out fine. With brick, it’s harder to remove the paint, so you want to start with more watered down paint and slowly add paint to your mixture than the other way around. Here’s an example of whitewashed brick. Click the link to read more.
Solid Color Paint – You can just pick a color and paint it with a solid color with a brush. I’ve done this before in a house we remodeled and I painted the brick white. It looked fine and went with the decor. But, now, after experimenting with so many other styles of painting since then, I would go for another look that accentuates instead of covering up the texture of the bricks.
Whitewashing – With this technique, you would paint the bricks a solid color, but you would water down the paint first. You can do a half and half mixture of paint and water, but actually, I would start with a small mixture of 3/4 water and 1/4 paint and slowly do small tests, adding a little more paint, until you get the transparency in the paint that you want. You can use regular latex wall paint (100% acrylic is best), I’ve used it before on brick and it turned out fine. With brick, it’s harder to remove the paint, so you want to start with more watered down paint and slowly add paint to your mixture than the other way around. Here’s an example of whitewashed brick. Click the link to read more.
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2 comments
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Love the idea of whitewashing. Our ProTect Painter in Lancaster PA completed a fireplace project for a client with this approach. http://pinterest.com/pin/480829697686622912/
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Thanks for your inspiration. One wall in my living room has Z-Brick (from the 70's) on the wall around the fireplace. Not only was it Z-Brick, but it had black grout around white bricks dappled with black and grey. When we did it in the 70's it looked so nice, but now it's old, dark and outdated. I used your idea of 1/2 latex paint and 1/2 water to make it look so much better. I dabbed the paint on the black first so that I could get it into all the nooks and crannies around each brick. Doing sections at a time, I then used a cheap foam brush to run some paint on each brick. Once I had done a few, I then wiped each brick down with a damp sponge. That gave the translucency that I wanted. It turned out wonderful and made the room look so much lighter. After I live with it a bit just the way it is, I might dapple some thinned out deep soft red & black mixed together to give the brick a little bit of warmth. It's a north facing room that was previously accented with blue which really gave it a cool look, but it's time to change that up. So far, I've added reddish curtains and a photo wall décor of 5 pieces in reds and yellows to warm up the room. A new area rug and the extra softness in the brick will make a huge difference.
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