Melted Crayon Art! (Easy DIY Craft!)

I have wanted to make a melted crayon art project for a while now (Thanks again, Pinterest). Today I finally had time to make one and it was suuuuuuuper easy and the entire process only took about an hour. And I used all the old remnants of crayons from my classroom that would have just ended up being thrown in the trash (Bonus Zen Points for helping out Mama Earth!).

What You'll Need:
- A Canvas/Background or whatever you want to use for the back
- Crayons (I used about 40+)
- Hot Glue Gun
- Newspaper
- Silhouette Template
- black sharpie, pencil
- scotch tape
- hair dryer

1. Get your backdrop ready! Most of the projects I've seen on Pinterest use a white artists canvas as the background (You can find these at Michaels for under $10). I didn't have a canvas (and didn't feel like running out to get one) but I did have foam core board, which I liked because you can easily cut it to exactly the size you need with a yard stick and an X-acto knife! So I cut my board in half to start.

2. Find a silhouette (if you want one).  I saw really neat projects that had a silhouette on the backdrop in black to add something different to it, so I hit Google Images and found one that I liked of a couple standing underneath an umbrella. After some screen snapshots and resizing of the picture, I printed it out and then carefully cut it out (use a good pair of scissors or an X-acto knife here). Then I positioned it on my background and traced it with a pencil. Once I had a good tracing I colored it all in with a black Sharpie.

Cut-Out Template

Final Traced Silhouette

3. Sort Crayons & Glue to Background.  Depending on how you want your final project to look you can use all one color, or different shades of blue, or all the colors. I arranged mine into rainbow order and then used a hot glue gun to attach them to the foam board.

 

4. Set up Work Area! I've read from other bloggers and pinners that the melted wax can splatter a lot and I didn't really believe them until I did this myself. It splatters A LOT so I was glad that I set up the area for the project by taping some newspaper to the wall and floor (tape it because the air from the hairdryer will want to blow it around). And last thing for prep: if you're using a silhouette you need to cover it up to keep the crayon drippings from getting on it! I covered mine with strips of scotch tape, but I bet blue painters tape would do the best job!

 

5. Melt Crayons!!! I had my hairdryer temperature set to hot and the speed to high, which seemed to be the best way (even though it splatters). Setting your hairdryer to a low speed didn't seem to work in melting the crayons and I'm sure it would take much longer. Point the hairdryer about the middle of the crayon wrapper pointing down to help make form the drops into streams going down. It takes a while for the crayons to get hot enough to melt, but once they do they melt quickly so be ready.

 



 

Once your crayons are done melting you need to let the wax dry for about 5-10 minutes, then you can peel off what you used to cover your silhouette and you have your finished product!

 

Here is mine!