3-D paper town

With the current stay at home situation it can be difficult to find new, different, or interesting things to keep kids busy. I stumbled across a set of printable 3-D house templates and tried them out with our daughter. It was an immediate hit and before I knew it, we were on the way to creating our very own 3-D paper town.

An aerial view of our town with the city on the left and the neighborhood houses on the right.

We don’t actually have a name for our town yet, other than it being referred to as “our town” right now. We started by creating fun modern (dream) homes and slowly added things like a barn for a farm, a hair salon for her Nana, a music studio for her Dad, and most recently a school.

The neighborhood with both modern and traditional style of houses, the Niffler Academy, and the pond at the farm.

We used two pieces of white poster board paper and set them on top of large cardboard boxes. The roads are 1″ wide strips of black cardstock. The sidewalks are 1/4″ wide strips of grey cardstock.

We love to look at buildings that have murals painted on them. We used a lot of the blank space on the back and sides of our buildings for more decorations.

Nana’s hair salon, her Dad’s music shop, and a gymnastics studio for a friend

A lot of the buildings we’ve made are of imaginative businesses. I made a dream version of my friend Jen’s stationery store, Tiny Turns Paperie, into a high-ceilinged building with a gigantic card wall inside. I printed out a very small version of our friend Marie’s letterpress work and applied it on the back of the building as if it was a mural.

A library for our town. I used washi tape with books on the inner wall to make it look like shelves.

A cool, modern, and very green art studio space for her art teacher who she really misses seeing these days. Her teacher’s favorite color is green and we just went crazy with a Sharpie before coloring in this one.

A little bakery for one of our friends who makes so many yummy things and shares them with us. It’s the modern house template but I filled in the carport with vellum to make it look like a storefront.

As you can see, you can really stretch your imagination when it comes to decorating the buildings. We used colored pencils, markers, dot paint, gel pens, patterned paper, and washi tape. Basically, many things you probably already have on hand right now. (Come to think of it, I’m a little surprised that our daughter hasn’t brought out the glitter yet …)

She adores the artistic creations by our friend and local artist, Bren Bataclan, so she drew sushi in “Bren-style” on the side of this restaurant. It’s fun blending in parts of our real world into this imaginary town.

I went all out to create this floral shop / apartment building by bringing out the big guns: some rubber stamps. I love the flower and leaf images in this Altenew set so I scattered them onto the template before coloring them in with colored pencils.

We printed everything on regular printer paper and it worked fine (I think they recommend cardstock). You’ll need an exacto knife to cut out the windows (so an adult should do that part) and then we used a combination of tape and glue to form the buildings.

Have fun with these templates and see what you can create with them. We’re still working on things like a pet store, a dance studio, a yarn shop, a gaming lounge, and more.

Stay safe and be crafty, friends!