How to Create a Medieval Castle

Look to images of real castles for inspiration.

Start saving your small cardboard boxes and cardboard tubes. This includes cereal boxes, tissue boxes, macaroni and cheese boxes, paper towel tubes and toilet paper tubes. These simple materials can be transformed into a grand, medieval castle. Use the boxes and tubes to make a stockpile of castle parts and arrange and glue them on a cardboard base any way you like to create your own architectural tour de force.

Things You'll Need

• Cardboard boxes and tubes
• Grey craft paper
• Grey crayon, colored pencil or marker
• Cardboard
• Craft knife
• Scissors
• Glue
• Toothpicks (optional)
• Flocking (optional)
• Glitter (optional)

Instructions

1. Prepare several sheets of gray craft paper for covering the castle parts. Use a darker gray crayon, colored pencil or marker to make little suggestions of brick here and there.

2. Cut out a flat cardboard square using a craft knife to the dimensions that you would like your castle grounds to be. Glue gray craft paper to cover the square.

3. Turn cardboard tubes into castle towers and turrets (small towers along the castle wall). Cover the tubes in gray craft paper. Cut out little notches in the tubes for windows. Give the tubes conical rooftops. Make conical roofs by cutting out circles of gray craft paper with scissors, cutting slits half way through each circle and folding the circles in to turn them into cones. Glue the cones to the top of the tubes.

4. Make cardboard boxes into castle buildings. Cover the boxes in gray craft paper. Cut rectangular openings along the top edges of some boxes to make castle crenels. Give other buildings peaked roofs. Create a peaked roof by cutting triangles at two opposing topsides of a box then cutting the other sides flat. Create the peaked rooftop by cutting out a flat cardboard square just larger than the dimensions of the box, creasing it down the middle and gluing it to the top of the box. Cut out arched windows in the square buildings as you see fit.

5. Arrange your parts on the cardboard base and glue them down. Place a couple of look out towers around the perimeter and one of the square buildings as an entryway.

6. Cut out rectangles of cardboard for castle walls. Cover them in craft paper and cut crenels along the top edges. Glue the walls around the perimeter and in between the perimeter buildings.

7. Draw on or cut out of brown construction paper a drawbridge, which can be rectangular or have a rounded top, and glue it the bottom-center of the entryway building.

8. Add any other details you can think of, such as toothpick flags, green flocking moss and grass, or fairy tale glitter.

References

• stormthecastle: Make a Paper and Cardboard Medieval Castle