Melted Crayon Art

     I have found a lot of uses for broken crayons. One thing I never imagined doing was running them through my glue gun and making "paintings" with them. However, I had a little inspiration, so I decided to give it a try.

     First let me say this, it isn't as easy as it looks. It seems like it would be pretty straight forward. Push crayon through glue gun, drip on canvas. Viola! Yeah, not quite. At one point, my glue gun decided to turn into a hot, melted crayon volcano. So, after 2 disappointing attempts, I abandoned the glue gun for another technique that I read about, the hair dryer.

    I started by picking the picture that I wanted. You need to select one that is going to make a good silhouette. It doesn't matter if there is stuff in the background, you can edit that out. Here's the picture I started with:

     I don't own a light board, so I printed the picture and cut Thing 1 out. I used that as a stencil to trace her silhouette onto my canvas. I then used a black paint marker to color it in.

     Before doing anything else, you need to protect your work space! I thought that mine was well protected. The orange spot that is now on my carpet would beg to differ.

     Since I wasn't starting at the top of the canvas, I used painters tape to attach paper where I wanted to start my crayons. I then used craft glue to attach the crayon pieces to the paper.

     Next, I stood the canvas on it's side so that the crayon would run down as it melted.

     Finally, I used my hair dryer to melt the crayons. It didn't take very long before they started melting and running down the canvas. I used several reds, orange and yellow. In the end, they all ran and mixed together.  Allow the crayon to dry before moving the canvas.

     Here's the final product:

     It didn't turn out exactly as I had planned, but I love the end result.

     What do you think? Will you use the new melty crayon technique in any of your crafts?