Celebrating Crayon Art

The kids and I saw this project on the web and had to give it a try. We gave a canvas (purchased at 50% off at Michael's - you have got to love a good coupon!) and gave it a base coat  of acrylic paint the color of our wall. We used hot glue to attach some crayons (3 of each color minus brown from boxes of 24 crayons, purchased for $.25/box at Target during back to school sales). Then we prepped our area by placing lots of newspaper around and attacked them with a hair dryer.

I am going to be honest. There were some rough moments. We, unfortuntately, set ourselves up in the blazing sun. We quickly got hot and that amped up the frustration level when the crayons started falling off of the canvas. We later discovered that we needed to use A LOT of hot glue to keep them in place.

The tops of our crayons melted more than we would have liked. That may have been an error on our part. We also had some splashes go across the canvas, rather than down. We had to be super careful where we pointed the hair dryer.

We decided to just go with the flow (literally) and melted it in three stages, letting it dry between. We found that what worked best for us was to heat them and move onto the next color, then cycle back to get them to run down the canvas. We also found that blue and purple melted much faster and white is almost impossible to melt. No idea why.

This was our final product. We used 3M velcro to attach it since we forgot to put the picture hangers on before we started and then there was no way to do it without breaking all of the crayons. It is now hanging in our Bonus Room which is where the kids play and craft. The perfect touch for an empty spot! The kids are waiting for the day when I let them hang it upside down, which will be a totally different look indeed!