Cantine del Vino già Schiavi is a cicchetti bar and wine shop in the Dorsoduro neighborhood of Venezia. For the exterior of my dollhouse replica, I was inspired by certain features of the actual building, namely the bricks and dark wood trim. I began by painting the trim with a dark walnut stain, before then turning my attention to the bricks. There are many techniques for creating brick siding on a dollhouse, one of which uses egg cartons, which have a similar rough texture. I initially considered going this route, but after having had so much fun constructing faux granite floor tiles for Gastronomia Furlan, I really wanted to try using polymer clay to make these bricks.
I ended up using mostly Fimo Professional terracotta, but to provide some variation, I also made some lighter colors by mixing the terracotta with Fimo Soft sahara and Premo white. After cutting sheets of clay into various sizes, I gave the bricks texture with crumpled aluminum foil and shaded them with a range of soft pastel colors.
After baking the bricks and sealing them with Helmar Crystal Kote Matte spray varnish, I used acrylic paint to give them an even more weathered appearance.
I then glued the bricks in place, following the pattern on the real-life building, in which long and short bricks alternate on each row. (Knowing absolutely nothing about masonry, I’d Googled images for inspiration and learned that this pattern is called a Flemish bond. The short bricks would actually be the ends of regular bricks positioned sideways.)
Next, I applied dollhouse mortar (mixed with water) in the gaps between the bricks.
Here’s a closer look.
The back and side walls don’t really show that much, given that I have all my shops displayed side by side against a wall. I therefore don’t typically do anything special, other than paint the walls a color that matches the facade. But one of my early dollhouse miniature orders arrived with an unexpected surprise in the bottom of the box: a sleeve containing three sheets of brick wallpaper that I didn’t order but was allowed to keep. I hadn’t planned on ever using them, but when I decided to decorate the facade of this shop with polymer clay bricks, this seemed like a perfect use for the wallpaper.
