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It’s been pointed out to me that a some folks have trouble drawing bricks. No problem. Here’s a few tips. Apart from eyeballing it, there are two basic ways to go about it.
Method One
The first way is to draw a grid of squares on your castle walls. It’s best to do this before you glue towers, while you can still lie the box flat. It’s also best to use a pencil or else to mark extremely lightly when drawing the vertical lines.
If you’re using a sizable box, you don’t need to keep to a particular size of grid. Just make the grid the width of your ruler by tracing lines down both sides of it. Slide the ruler to line up with the right-most line (or left-most if you’re left handed) and draw another line and repeat. This will result in pretty big bricks, so if your castle is less than a foot tall, you may want to use a smaller measurement. (On the other hand, the smaller the brick the more of them you have to draw, so it’s a trade-off).
If you haven’t already, color in the horizontal lines with a solid marker or crayon.
Then draw in every other vertical line in one of the rows you’ve drawn. Moving to the next row, draw in the lines that you didn’t draw in on the first row. Repeat until done.
If you want extra credit, you can draw the corners where the lines intersect even thicker. This will make it look more like bricks and mortar. You also don’t have to drawn in every single least little line all the way through. A certain irregularity makes a castle wall look more realistic. As long as you make sure to connect up the corners it will look great.
Method Two
The other way to make bricks is to cut out a template-brick and trace around it. It’s best to make the template as thick as possible since repeated tracing around a thin piece of paper quickly tends to demolish it. A scrap piece of cardboard works perfectly.
Make the template-brick at least twice as wide as it is tall. (So if it’s an inch and a half wide, it should be no more than .75 inches tall). Lay it down on the corner of one of your castle walls and trace it. Move it to the side and trace again until you’ve got the first row of bricks done. Make sure you stagger it so that the second row of bricks doesn’t line up with the first one and repeat. That’s it!
It may look like this is the easier method to do, but in my experience it sure seems to take a lot longer than using a ruler. However, I didn’t time myself, so I have no real scientific data to verify this theory.
The main advantage of the template-method is that really little kids have an easier time with it. Sometimes they have trouble with the idea of measuring out grids but seem to grasp tracing intuitively.
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