Castle Paining 101
Hello again! This is a quick tutorial on how to paint a Styrofoam castle. After spending a lot of time painting the castle WRONG I decided someone might benefit from this and save themselves hours of time! I received my first castle cake order a couple of weeks ago and was excited to try this design out.
First thing first: order the castle topper. I found a nice selection of castle toppers at CalJava Online:
http://www.caljavaonline.com/castles1.htm. For this I ordered Castle #8. Make sure to charge your client accordingly as the castle itself is about $50 plus taxes and shipping charges.
What made this castle tricky, is that the client wanted to stick with the fushia hue for the castle as well. While I know airbrush colors would work real nice there was no standard fushia airbrush color and I was unsure which colors to mix since airbrush colors are a little harder to visualize until you spray it.
So I opted to mix a number of my cake colors to get a similar shade. I turns out electric pink and lavender (purple and white) gave me a good fushia. I know it looks red below and above it looks pink but it really did look fushia! Ok so here is my summary of do's and don't-s for painting Styrofoam castles:
Do's and Don't-s
Do
- Use an airbrush
- If you want to hand paint use petal dust with vodka
- If you don't have petal dust or an airbrush use only paste cake colors (like Wilton)
Don't
- Don't use the more liquidy gel colors (like Americolor). They have just the right amount of water to make Styrofoam painting frustrating.
- Don't pipe the tower tips with buttercream... ok so I know that might be a design preference for you but I tried it, it really wasn't too pretty, and it made a big MESS of my castle painting job. I was hoping to go over it with silver luster dust when it dried, but it didn't look too good and my painting problems snowballed from there once I got the Styrofoam greasy!
Hope this mini tutorial helps someone out there who may be thinking of painting a Styrofoam castle (or other Styrofoam) cake topper!:)
Happy Caking!
Christie
