Woot: Melted Crayon Art

Since this is our first post, I don't have "in process" pictures, but I'll be doing those for future projects. I'm going to talk to you today about my most recent Pinterest adventure, melted crayon art.

The original pin link: http://unsimpleliving.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/melted-crayon-art/

This one looks pretty easy, right? Glue gun, canvas, some crayons, melt 'em with a hair dryer, and boom... You have art for your walls. The good news is that yes, it is pretty easy.

Michael's had a great sale on canvas this week, plus a 25% off coupon for President's Day, so that's why I chose this project. An 8x10 canvas that's normally about $7-8 (I can't remember exactly how much, so let's say $8). Take 40% off of that and 25% off of THAT, you get $3.60. Not bad! However, a box of 96 crayons at Michael's was $7.99. What! Even with my 25% coupon, I wasn't paying that for crayons that I wanted to destroy anyway! At Walmart, I was able to find them for about $5. That was a little more reasonable. I wanted to do a garden scene, so I also bought some flower scrapbook stickers for about $2.75 on sale at Michael's.

So here's what I had when I started: An 8x10 canvas, 96 crayons, glue gun and sticks, and a blow dryer

As I said, I wanted to do a garden scene, so I started by picking the green crayons out of the box. I quickly realized that there are not 8 inches of green crayons in a box of 96, so I had to decide what other colors I wanted to mix in with them. I decided on yellow and brown. It took 22 crayons to cover the bottom.

Sticking the crayons to the canvas was easy with the hot glue. I turned all of mine so that the "Crayola" part of the label was sticking up. Watch the hot glue, obviously. It burns your fingers if you get it on them. Make sure you get a good amount on there because I had one pop off after I was finished before I hung it up.

Now it's time to melt. I'm an impatient person, so I turned my hair dryer up full heat and blast and waved it around over the crayons. It only took about 15 seconds for them to start melting. Number one thing to realize about melting crayons? They SPLATTER. Don't do this on the carpet of your living room floor with just a little piece of paper under it like I stupidly did. I'd recommend some newspapers or better yet, a dropcloth if one is available to you. The splatters also mean that the design can be hard to control. If you are anal retentive about control, this may not be your project. :P

I didn't let mine melt very far because I wanted them to turn them into flowers, so I left some white space. I found that if you see a trail of melting that you want to continue, you can sort of "chase it" on with the hair dryer. This gives you a little control, but not much. It dries pretty quickly once you remove the heat. Then I added the flowers. First, I tried blue flowers.

I didn't like those. I think it was because of the yellows and browns I had to put in my grass. So back to Michael's I went for a different color.

I liked these warmer colors much better.

I had a bunch of crayons left, obviously, so I made a second one in shades of pink and purple. This one I just let be more abstract and about seeing what the melting did rather than trying to follow any sort of pattern, and I liked how it turned out, too, but for some reason, I didn't line the crayons up as well that time...

Difficulty Rating: Easy. If you can dry your hair, you can make this kind of art.

Project Cost: About $12 with sale materials

Verdict: I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. This would be a great project for kids (with some hot glue help) to create some cool art for their rooms. There's a lot of potential for coming up with your own spin on it, too.