I'd seen various articles and mentions on here about the Redutex self adhesive textures and thought they might be worth a play with to see what they were like, each to their own but I just can't get on with brickpapers so I thought these might be a bit of a half way house having the relief of plastic/plasticard and the self coloured nature of printed papers.

So a sample was ordered from modeltextures.co.uk (usual disclaimer) I went for the Flemish bond brick with dark mortar in the coloured Polychromatic choice. I quite like the dark mortar ones as plenty of older buildings were built with black ash mortar which obviously is dark grey.

Some time ago I picked up a Model Power building under construction kit, this I believe was originally a Pola kit it's European heritage given away to a degree by the slightly ornate building style and construction of the building from stone, brick and stucco. I could never quite get on with it and even though any kit I ever lay my hands on doesn't get built as per instructions this one just seemed 'wrongf'

So as a bit of a trial for the textures I thought I'd use this as a base to build something a bit plainer... The surface relief was sanded off on two sides, the third probably won't get seen if it gets used, to this a little bit of detail was added using Evergreen plasticstrip and painted in a suitable colour.

Then to add the textures....

Quite weird stuff, fairly thick and rubbery but with nice colouring and texture, I found it very easy to cut and position, the glue is a little forgiving taking 24hrs to fully harden, but it does stick and very well.

The Texture from Model Textures came with a 3 page 'how to' hints sheet, very useful and helpful, it can be folded round corners but butt joints, trimmed up are better, this I did trimming any excess off with a scalpel, windows were easily opened out, trimming the damaged brick bits was easy too, overall much easier than I had anticipated.

The major thing I was concerned about was how the sheets would take my normal course of heavy weathering (well it is 'Grime Street') but this proved to be not a problem and they look the same or better than my usual buildings.

Overall, very easy to use, nicely detailed and a great product, I can see me using plenty, admittedly it's nowhere near as cheap as plasticard or brickpaper but the ease of use balances that out for me to a degree. I wish I'd known about it before I scribed millions of setts!

I have a number of Leeds type 2 back to back terrace ends to build, these will be Redutex over a plasticard basic box structure, but that's for the extension after the current extension.

Anyway a few pics of work in progress, much still to do, sills and lintels next from more plastic strip then detail and weathering, might get used now.