Bodium Castle

This has been an ongoing project since before Christmas, but we finally got it finished this evening.  The kids were wanting to do something with papier mache, so we decided to make a castle.  We looked online at a variety of castles and decided that Bodium Castle was a nice shape, so we used a lot of cardboard boxes, Pringle tubes and sellotape to make a basic castle shape.

Then we used a mixture of approx 3/4 water and 1/4 PVA glue (and a lot of newspaper) to coat the castle.  The basic process is to lay a strip of newspaper on, then use a paintbrush to soak it in the water / glue mixture.  It's important to make sure the paper is pushed well into the corners as it makes it much more solid.

Once that had dried (it took about 24 hours) we did another coat. 

And then a third coat, making sure to get into all the corners, and checking really carefully that everything was covered.  We used much longer strips of newspaper on this coat.

Once that was dry, the next step was to pain it grey, and then leave it to dry again.

And then a second coat of grey paint.

Then lastly (this evening) I mixed up another three shades of grey, all slightly darker than the base coat, and we used finger painting to put on the 'stones'.

 

Now the only thing left to do is to find somewhere to put it!