Castle Painting 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