Creative Friday~ Home school edition

As part of our homeschooling education, Fridays are usually dedicated to doing something creative.  So far we've done watercolor painting, made goop, baked bread, cookies and play dough.

I've seen these wonderful melted crayon canvas art  on Pinterest and decided I had to do it with my son.

He's melted crayons accidentally leaving them in the car but never
on purpose so I knew it would be something he would love.
I was right and now his art work is proudly on display in his room.

Here's what we used:

a heat gun (I've heard a blow dryer will also work)

A large canvas (ours is 9 X 11)

A large selection of crayons~my son always takes home the crayons from restaurants
and we have extras from other boxes.  We ended up using 42 total this time.

Hot Glue gun and glue sticks

Contact Paper (it's what we had on hand)

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1. Decide on your design. I showed Ian all the different things I'd found so he could get an ideas. In the end he decided to try doing his name.

In a document, I enlarged his letters to 600%, printed them then cut them out of contact paper to stick on the canvas.

While I was doing that he chose the colors he wanted
and put them in the order he wanted them to be in across the canvas. He also decided he wanted to keep the 'crayon skins' (his words!) on instead of taking them off.

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2. After placing your design, use your hot glue gun to attach all your colors to the top of the canvas. We were actually glad we left the 'skins' on because our glue was so hot the crayons started to melt right when they touched the glue!

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3. Lean your canvas against something and place some cardboard underneath to catch the drips) then starting on the lowest setting, hold your heat source close to the crayons.

We did a slow back and forth motion very close to get started then pulled back as the crayons started to melt.

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4. Continue to melt the crayons until they have dripped down over your design and until you're happy with the amount of melt. Turn off your heat source and let the project sit for 3-5 minutes, then remove your stencils.

This is where we discovered that the heat from our gun was so hot it lifted the contact paper. But once we removed them, we scrapped some of the crayon wax off then took some acrylic paint and filled in some of the spots left.

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Done!

Before I set you loose, I must give you some words of caution:

~the crayon wax will pool under your project.
Make sure you have something to scrape the excess drips off especially if it drips to the back of your canvas which will leave crayon marks on your wall when you hang it.

~I cannot stress enough to let the work sit for a few minutes. Ian picked it up too soon and got a little burned by an errant drip.

~This is quite addictive...no crayon may be safe in your presence!