Nailed It... Melted Crayon Art

Let me prefix this by stating that this one, while cool, took a whole lot more time than I thought it would. And it wasn't very 'little hands' friendly. But other than that, it was fun and I think the end result was worth the amount of time it took to melt the crayons.

Anyone who has been on Pinterest has seen images like this:

credit - Artistic Life

Cool, huh? I had seen other ones, that were just essentially the rainbow of colors melted, but I liked the textured feel of this one and thought 'hey, we could make "Little P's Garden"'. Which is what we did.

I had Little P pick out the colors (granted, I had already sorted them out and had them in easy-to-reach piles for her) and the ones she didn't immediately stick in her mouth and take a huge bite of, went onto the canvas.

A word to the wise - 'those who do not respect the hot glue gun are destined to get burned by it.' Yup, not paying attention to the buildup of glue that was accumulating on the end of the gun resulted in me getting a lovely little blister on the end of my thumb from grabbing it in the wrong place. Oh, well. Live and learn.

Once the crayons had been glued onto the canvas, I placed it somewhere out of the reach of little hands and let it dry completely for two full days. Most tutorials for this say you only have to wait overnight, but with the rare humidity in Vegas while I was doing this, I decided to play it safe. Then, one evening while M was at work, we put the canvas in the bathroom, on top of piles of newspaper, on an angle and set to melting the crayons with my hair dryer. 

Little P helped for a while, holding the hair dryer, but for the most part, she just supervised, checking in on me every few moments or so to make sure I was still going. It took a good 20 minutes to get them melted and looking the way I wanted - if I had done this in the Summer time, it might have been easier to leave them outside in the 100 degree plus day for a few hours.

Once the wax had dried, I hot glued some pretty paper flowers on to it and 'ta-da', "Little P's Garden" was done.

(created March, 2012)

Not too bad an effort, if I do say so myself. 

Couple of things I would do differently, if I were to do it again.
            -  Use cheaper crayons, they apparently melt easier (although, with all the Back to  
                School sales on, you can't get much cheaper than Crayola at the moment)
            -  Use a smaller canvas. I had 12 x 12's on hand so that's what I used. In the future, I 
                would probably go with a 10 x 10 or maybe a 9 x 12.
            -  Add support to the back of the canvas. This would make sure that all of the 
                crayons have an even coating of glue and are all secured to the canvas (I had to 
                re-glue a couple after the melting process).

So, there you have it - my version of 'Melted Crayon Art'. Me thinks I totally 'Nailed It'.

Till next time, let the colors of life always bloom in your heart.

K