Brick Carving Knife

The U-STAR knife for carving brick texture

A brick wall on a model stands or falls on the regularity of the joints. Carving them freehand with a knife means uneven spacing and ragged ends, so a shaped tool is used for this work, with which the joint is pulled in one pass or in several repeated ones. A knife for carving brickwork works the same way as a panel line scriber: it does not cut through but takes material off in thin layers, so the depth of the joint can be metered to suit the scale of the building.

Field of use

• Suggesting brick and stone masonry on the walls of structures in a diorama.
• Adding texture to modeling putty, plaster sheets and plastic sheets.
• Breaking up a regular area, for example suggesting a missing brick or damaged plaster.
• Reworking and deepening joints that are already on parts from the mold.

What to watch out for

It pays to work against a ruler or a template so that the horizontal joints keep their direction; the vertical ones are then added freehand, because it is precisely their slight irregularity that makes a wall believable. Put the carving before painting, so that a wash gets into the fresh joints and brings them out. Work with light passes: in a small scale, a joint that is too deep reads as a hollow rather than a wall. Try the procedure first on an offcut of the same material, as every material carves differently. The tip is the working part of the tool; store it separately so that it does not get dull.

Who it is for

• Builders of dioramas and structures who create the texture of the brickwork themselves.
• Modelers working with modeling putty and plastic sheets.
• Anyone whose joint spacing runs away when carving brickwork freehand.