Crayon Art

Luke's 100th day of school is coming up--I think, anyway. With all of the delays and snow days, I'm not quite sure where we are, but his teacher sent home a note saying that students needed to create a project involving 100 something. Truthfully, I am not crafty. At all. I am definitely not a crafty mom. I wish I was, but I pretty much fail at it which is where I'm thankful for Pinterest. My idea of a project involving 100 of something would be spelling Luke's name out with 100 Cheerios glued onto a piece of paper. Certainly fine, but I wanted us to do something more fun, so I searched around and came across quite a few really great ideas. The one that really struck me was crayon art, specifically this tutorial. I showed it to Luke and he agreed that he would like to do that, so after his Saturday basketball game, we headed to Michael's to purchase supplies.

Although I followed a tutorial, I also altered it slightly, so I thought I would share what we did. First of all, I didn't buy a canvas because I'm cheap, canvases are expensive and I'm always slightly suspicious of Pinterest projects. Instead we bought foam board, which is much cheaper than a canvas. Since this is a school project, it isn't something I expect to display around the house, so foam board was okay with me. I also wanted to have the number 100 white-d out in the center, so I bought masking tape and applied that to the center. I used two layers of masking tape because I thought that would be easier to peel off, but I'm not sure it was in the end.

Since this was Luke's project, I let him sort the crayons by color order however he wanted before we started. I bought a pack of 120 crayons at Michael's and just set 20 aside. He chose to sort by color groups and chose what order he wanted them to go in before we started.

I used a hot glue gun to put the crayons on the board. It was kind of a learning curve at first, especially with a six year old helping. A thin strip of glue straight down seemed the best, easiest way to affix the crayons to the board. I will be honest--this part takes awhile. If I was doing this just for something to display around the house, I would've just done the crayons around the top. However, since the theme was 100, we wanted to have 100 crayons across the board, so we continued the line of crayons across the bottom to get to 100. (And yes, I could've done 50 across the top and 50 across the bottom to make it even, but no. That wasn't happening.)

Now for the fun part… the actual crayon melting! Luke took this picture, so it's a little blurry. First of all, make sure you put down a lot of towels or newspaper because the wax will splatter. I put down towels, but still ended up having to scrape some off the bathroom floor when we were finished. I started out with the hair dryer on high heat but low blower setting. This seemed to not be melting the crayons and I was thinking, "Pinterest fail," so I bumped it up to high blower. Then the crayons started melting. I had Luke tilt the board to direct the wax run off in whichever direction he thought it should go. Since we had crayons on the top and bottom, we did the top first, then moved on to the bottom. The wax dries very quickly, so you don't have to wait long.

After about twenty minutes of blow drying, we had this. I've seen a few tutorials where people melt the crayons completely, but Luke preferred the splatter effect to the caked on wax effect, so we stopped with some of the crayons still intact.

The wax dries very quickly and we were able to peel off the tape after only about two minutes, so very quickly, we had our finished product!

Although gluing the actual crayons the board is time-consuming, we had a lot of fun doing this. I would love to let each boy choose an assortment of crayons and spell out of their name on canvas to display in the house. It's simple art, but it allows kids to take a major role in it and honestly, I had fun doing it, too.