Cardboard Castle Model for Kids

Does your kid want new toys? If you got your kid a play mat or play set or such for a celebration then why not give them buildings to go with them as a treat or another present? They can be made on a budget of next to nothing and you can get children of any age to help.

Here is how.

Cardboard - easy to get hold of, I am using old delivery boxes and packets. You can use what ever you want.

Scissors and/or a knife - need to be sharp, most people have both. Use smooth blades, not serrated or jagged ones.

Straight Edge - rulers, book spines, pieces of wood, whatever is smooth and to hand.

Masking tape - cheap, easy to mark, easy to cut, sticks stuff together.

Pen or Pencil - I am using a biro and a black marker. They work. Pencils work too.

Matt Emulsion Wall Paint - You don't need a fat lot, just enough to cover a model or two.

Paint Brushes - For applying the paint.

The best thing to do here is to make stuff that supports other toys your child has. In my case the little one has a playmat with a town printed on it, a bunch of cars and a truck. She does have a space ship and a farm yard set but she just runs around with the space ship and mostly ignores the farm set. She play more with the play mat, whether she has the home made playdoh on it or the cars or some figurines.

Having this in mind it would be nice to have buildings for her, using the placement of buildings on the mat as templates for where the buildings can go. This means they can be dropped into position as and when the mat comes out but they aren't mandatory things to have. I have opted to build a castle, namely because it's a fairly easy thing to get started with but also because I like castles.

First off you will need to take a piece of card to act as a base. I used a piece of corrugated cardboard and marked it out and cut it to shape to fit the place on the mat. Because I don't want the edges to look terrible I took some masking tape and covered them. This also makes it look nicer when it comes to painting.

The Next Job was to add a focal point to the castle. In this case I decided to make a large tower. I took a piece of corrugated card, worked out a half way point giving two basic sides and scored along the corrugation. This gave me two sides. I then worked out the quarters and scored again. This gave me four sides. I folded along the scores until I had an oblong shaped box and used masking tape to create a join. I then attached it to the base in the same manner, making sure to cover the edges.

In reality you could stop here, There is no reason you have to make something huge. You could add a roof, prime it and paint it with your child. I have chosen to go further as I have more time to do so.

Lets expand this a bit. There are a couple of main options we can go for, the Ruin option, where we make jagged walls and make it look like it's falling down, or the fully maintained castle that is a tourist attraction. I am personally going with the latter, namely because I think the little one will enjoy it more than a broken old ruin. Ultimately the choice is yours, you can do whatever you or your child want. I am adding a full set of walls, one of the easiest parts to do. I have used an amazon card envelope for this, again you can use whatever you want or have to hand.

The first thing to do is split the edges of the envelope and trim down the edges. I used a cheap pen knife and a pair of scissors from the kitchen. The next part is to work out how our castle walls will fit, I decided to make mine follow the edges of the base, with a slight gap to make attaching them easier. I worked out where I wanted corners based on the outline made by the masking tape edges. I then marked out, scored and cut breaks in the flaps, making sure they lined up with the edges of the base. Once this was done I folded the walls and flaps, fixed them down with masking tape and found other areas where joins were needed to make the whole thing sturdier.

I carried on in this fashion till I had a basic tower with walls spreading out and round.

This is more to show you what I did and didn't do so I skipped a couple of steps to take pictures. Mostly close ups of how the attachment of the ramparts looks. Yours will most likely look better than mine. Once you are happy with it get some white matt emulsion that you would use on your walls and use it as a primer paint. Once it is dry you can get your kids to paint it.