How to Decorate & Customize Your Paper Blocks

Making each artwork truly yours

Every paper block starts as a blank surface — and what you do with it is up to you. Paint it, draw on it, splash it, leave it plain. Whatever you decorate stays folded into the finished piece permanently, so this is where a kit of blocks becomes your piece, not just a copy of the photo on the product page.

Want to skip straight to decorating? 

Get the Paper Kit  —  every block comes pre-cut and ready to fold, so there's no measuring or cutting involved. Open the box and you're already at the fun part.

Choose Your Paper Kit

Need a pure white canvas to paint, sketch, or splash color onto? 

Chestnut is on sale right now, and it folds inside-out to reveal plain white paper underneath — an instant blank canvas, no need to hunt down white blocks separately.

Get Chestnut Blocks
Grandparents decorating paper kit blocks together — family wall art project, Paragami

Why bother customizing at all?

A piece you decorated yourself is a piece you'll actually appreciate differently — you made it, not just assembled it. It's also a good excuse to do something hands-on and offline for an hour: no screen, just paint, paper, and whatever pattern is in your head. And since no two decorated pieces turn out the same, you end up with something nobody else has, even if a hundred other people bought the exact same design.

Made for sharing, too 

Decorating blocks isn't just a solo activity — give one block to each person and the whole thing becomes a group project.

For Team Building

Everyone decorates and folds their own block, and together the team builds one shared piece that stays on the office wall.

Team Building Activity

For Weddings 

Each guest decorates and signs their block, which can double as a seating card, and by the end of the day you've got a wall piece built by everyone who was there.

Wedding Guest Book Alternative

Solid vs. Laminated — know what you're painting on 

  • This applies no matter which paper design you're working with.

    Solid Colour — Premium, colour-soaked paper with no white edges on cuts. Works like classic paper — easy to draw on with markers, pencils, or watercolours.


    Laminated — Colour-printed with a shiny plastic coating that protects the surface. Resistant to splashes — just wipe clean with a wet wipe. The laminated surface doesn't absorb ink easily, so use a permanent marker or latex-based paint when drawing or colouring on it.

Techniques to try

Doodles & sketches 

The simplest way in. Grab a pen or a fine marker and just draw — a sketch, a pattern, a message. No planning required, and it's the lowest-effort way to make a block feel personal.

Techniques to try

Painted patterns 

Zebra stripes, giraffe spots, tiger markings — paint a different animal print on each block and build a whole mini safari across your piece. Works well as a group activity too: assign a pattern per person and see how it all comes together once assembled.

Techniques to try

Colour Splash — controlled chaos 

Splash, drip, and let the paint move. Colours bleed, mix, and blur as you tilt or press the paper. The paper is thick enough to absorb the paint without falling apart — each block captures a unique moment of movement. If you still want some structure, keep your splashes within your chosen 5-colour palette — it still reads as a "5-colour" piece, just a wilder version of one. Splashing is fun. Cleaning afterward… less so.

Techniques to try

Color Spray — metallic & solid finishes 

Spray paint gives fast, even coverage and strong surface character. Metallic finishes like gold, bronze, or copper give the blocks a reflective, architectural feel; solid colours create clean, uniform surfaces with subtle texture.

Vary the shade from block to block, or face to face, and the effect carries through the whole piece — since every block sits at a different angle once assembled, it shifts between tones depending on where you're standing, similar to a lenticular print. Metallic finishes make this especially noticeable, since they already catch and reflect light differently from every angle

Techniques to try

Spray Paint — Sandstone texture  

Ready-to-use stone-effect sprays (e.g. Maston's Spray Stone Effect Sandstone) give blocks a natural, rough texture. On plain paper (not a 3D print), spray directly — shake well, and use short, repeated passes rather than one heavy coat, as too much soaks the paper and can warp the edges.

Spray after folding, not before — the paper holds its shape better and the colour won't crack along the creases. Spraying from one direction naturally shades the nearer faces darker than the ones angled away, giving each block its own light-and-dark sides — or spray each face separately for a stronger effect.

Sarah Tourier

Techniques to try

Decoupage — texture & pattern 

Layer thin paper, prints, or textures onto the surface. This adds visual depth and tactile detail that shifts with light and viewing angle.

Techniques to try

One more thing — white edges on cut blocks

If you're working with laminated blocks (Hexspire or otherwise), the cut edge of the paper shows white, since the colour is only printed on the surface. A cheap marker — the kind kids use, no exact colour match needed — fixes this in seconds: the laminated surface won't absorb it, so mistakes wipe off cleanly, and the colour only needs to soak into that thin cut edge. This works on any paper with a white (or light) core under a printed colour, not just Hexspire blocks.

  • Orbit Fusion assembled — geometric paper kit wall art, Paragami
  • Wedding banquet table — interactive wall art guest book, Paragami

Make it yours.

However you decorate it — a careful pattern or total chaos — the result is something only you could have made. That's worth more than getting it "right."

Pick Your Design

PARAGAMI PAPER KITs

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