Castle Building Blocks

One day last year I came upon some castle building blocks from an Etsy shop called The Village Blocksmith. I decided to purchase this unfinished set for my nieces and to paint them.

Additionally, I bought 2 unicorns with peg doll riders and a dragon (which my 3-year-old niece calls a “drangon” 😀 ). I thought the peg dolls could represent each girl.

Originally I was going to stencil patterns on some or all of the blocks, but I ran out of time. Instead I just used some Pebeo high viscosity acrylic paint in iridescent colors (for some reason, Blick only carries the iridescent Studio Acrylics – Pebeo has a range of regular colors of Studio Acrylics which you can find at Jerry’s Artarama, who incidentally don’t carry the Pebeo Extra Fine Acrylics that Blick does).

Though the paints are high viscosity, I didn’t have any trouble with brush marks at all. I mostly used foam brushes for that reason, but I did also use regular brushes. The paint also has good coverage for the most part. The red one was a little bit thinner than the others.

I put Mod Podge hard coat on them as well. I recommend that if you don’t want any trace of a sticky finish. On the dragon and unicorns, I did use stencils that I got from Fresh Cut Studio and Concepts Reified. For the unicorn hair, I got yarn samples from Life’s An Expedition and glued it into some bead caps that I then glued to the wood.