Melty Crayon Awesomeness

Last week I pinned a melting crayon art project on my Pinterest boards with plans to use it sometime this year as an art project for home school. It looked so fun and easy, and I knew I had all the materials to do it. Eager to try it, I gathered all the kiddies at the kitchen table for a science/art lesson. First, we discussed rainbows - how they form, when you see them, etc. Then we learned ROYGBIV - the order of the colors of the rainbow. Using this new knowledge, I set the kids to organizing our crayons in rainbow order. We used two boxes of Crayola 24 crayons, and I took away the black, gray, brown, and white crayons since those colors do not appear in rainbows.

When the kids (mostly the girls) had carefully selected where each crayon should go, I hot-glued them in place at the top of our canvas. (Our canvas was 16" by 20", because that's what I had). We decided to keep the color name of each crayon facing outward so that they would all look uniform. Then the fun part started.

We propped up the canvas on a chair that I had liberally covered with newspaper. Using a hairdryer turned on high heat, I aimed it slightly downward at the purple/blue section of our crayon rainbow. The kids were delighted that immediately it began to melt and spray all over the place.

Each of the kids took turns making their own crayon wax splatters and using the "paint gun." (the Spud's words)>

We had a lot of splattering going on - I forgot to cover the side of our kitchen table with newspaper and soon it was speckled with various colors. In all the links I've seen, the artist managed to get their crayon wax flowing downward in straight lines. I think perhaps that's because they used a lower hair dryer setting or a different angle on their canvas.

Also, they probably didn't allow three-year-olds to man the hair dryer. :) I personally love the splattered look.

We then turned our hair dryer to low for a short while to blend our colors just a bit.

Here's a close-up of the colors all blended together. I'm not gonna lie - I was probably as excited or even more than the kids at this development. We still had quite a bit of blank canvas, and the girls suggested that we sign our artwork. I got the idea to trace each person's hand with their favorite color (with crayons from another box) and write their name with black sharpie in the center.

The kiddos posed proudly with their work (by the way, the crayon wax dries super fast so you don't have to wait forever like you do with paint.)

And then this pleased momma found a place in the dining room to hang it on the wall. The kids love to look at it, touch its interesting textures, and talk about ROYGBIV. Me? I'm planning our next masterpiece, perhaps in greens, grays, browns, and blacks for a camouflage effect for the boys' room.