La Belle Alliance Part Four

Hello There! I have made some progress on the La Belle Alliance building. The previous part is here. Since then I have washed the whole in a watered down wash of black paint. The tutorial that I have been following suggests using ink. In the past I have found that inks do have a habit of fading a bit. This was a different colour ink and on figures. In this case I presume that a wash of Vallejo 950 black paint would suffice. I applied a wash of watered down black paint to all the bricks and then taken some 400 grit sand paper and rubbed all the bricks down. I wondered what this would achieve but could see that the concave shape of the bricks caused by the embossing process was alleviated. The bricks had a flatter surface now.

I was following the instructions from tutorial by Emmanuel Nouaillier in the January 2026 edition on Continental Modeller.

It was at this point that I realised that I had missed a step out!

After embossing the foam core he recommends airbrushing the surface with two layers of Humbrol 'Neutral Grey' enamel paint. I feel an Vallejo equivalent would suffice. Anyway I inadvertently missed this step out. This did cause a few difficulties later.

When this is dry I then used various colours dry brushed on the surface. They included 982 cavalry brown, (main colour), 909 vermillion, 829 amarantha red, 957 flat red and mixed some of these colours with a small amount of black to obtain a number of different shades.

I would suggest when applying a vastly different shade to dry brush along the brick course as when a wall is built the bricks are usually taken from a pack and different shades of brick are usually present longitudinally. Some brickies do mix the brick packs before they lay them but this does not always happen.

This is the point that I realised what the airbrush layer of grey was for. The bricks, even after being light sanded had a series of groves in the surface. Although this was realistic the black wash was not adequate to fill this grooves in the brick surface. I applied a second black wash, were I could see this problem, to fill these creases. 

Here the end of the building has had a layer of white weathering powders applied and the powder has been pushed into the mortar joints using a dry brushing brush using a stippling action. There are some bricks that have a darker shade. This is a combination of an addition black wash and, as I felt the white mortar was too stark so mixed a black and and dust colour weather powders together to dull this white down.

Here is what the side looked like after just applying the white weathering powders. As you can see the powder, despite having a damp, (not wet!), kitchen towel, dabbed over them, the weathering powder tends to be trapped in the pitted surface of the bricks. I got over this by reapplying the dry brush colours over this. When happy with the finish I applied fixer for the weathering powder.

Here is a closer view of the side of the building before the reapplication of the brick colour. For added realism I picked out the odd brick suggesting that it had 'blown' and the frost had damaged the front of the brick.

I hope to have all four sides of brickwork completed by the end of the week and start the window frames and doors started.