Every side of a prim can be faced separately. Choose Paint and the kit appears in the palette: six surfaces, six colours, and a size.
- Surface — plain, stone, brick, planks, shingles, plaster or a ruled grid. Each is a pattern of light and shade, so it works in any colour.
- Colour — bare stone, whitewash, sandstone, granite, slate or timber. Below them, Pick a colour opens a wheel and paints in anything you like; choosing one of the six named finishes again puts the wheel away. The six stay because they say what a wall is made of, which is a better thing to say than #85603D.
- Size — how many metres of wall one repeat covers. Smaller and bigger change both ways at once; narrower and wider stretch the pattern across the face only, and shorter and taller up it. One drawing of planks gives floorboards, cladding or long thin battens depending on which pair you pull.
- Clear — how much of what is behind shows through. Glass, water, a lantern pane. It stops short of invisible, because a piece you cannot see is a piece you cannot get hold of again.
- Glow — how much light the surface gives off. A glowing face reads as bright at midnight instead of going the same grey as the wall behind it. Clear and glow together, in a bright colour, is a beam of light.
Click a side to face it; Face all sides does the whole piece at once. The side under your pointer lights up before you click, so you always know which one you are about to change.
A pattern is light and shade, not colour — it multiplies
against whatever colour the face wears. That is what lets any pattern work with
any colour, and it is also why a very dark colour swallows the pattern: there is
nothing left for the shade to take away. If your brickwork has gone flat, the
colour is too dark rather than the pattern being wrong.
Patterns are measured in metres of real wall, not in fractions of the piece. Stone reads the same size on a one-metre block as on a twelve-metre wall, courses line up across two prims stacked together, and stretching a wall slides more brick past rather than smearing the brick that is there.
Whatever the brush is set to is also what the next
piece you build wears. Set brick-in-timber, press New prim, and it arrives
already faced — faster than building plain and painting six sides.