Melted Crayon Art

6/18/18

    Today we did some melted crayon art. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, and we have a lot of crayons in our house that never get used because none of us are six year olds. My idea was to do a picture of a candle, because I thought that the wax of the crayon would look great as the wax of the candle. So I put some tape down where I didn’t want the wax to go and I started melting using a hair dryer. The crayons (which were taped down instead of glued since I wanted to remove them when I was done) flew off, and I had to try again, this time using a spatula in one hand to hold them down.

I had already painted the canvas mostly black except for a white patch which would be where the flame of the candle was shining. The green, blue, and purple crayons didn’t show up so well on the black background. Plus they ignored my taped and went ahead and snuck under it. I figured I could just scraped off the unwanted wax, but I was dead wrong. So by the end of the day I was a bit annoyed by my product.

The only things that showed up were the yellow crayon on the white canvas, that was the flame, and the yellow crayon that had melted down onto the “candle” by accident.

The following day I decided to try to improve it. At my mom’s suggestion I painted on top of the current wax with white and added more colors on top. The old wax melted along with the new wax (as I knew it would) and the paint got a patchy, crack look, which I was okay with - at least it showed up.

But then I decided to try something else. The yellow crayon had showed up on the black background, so I figured white crayon would also show up. I melted a couple white crayons and a glittery silver crayon on, which I quite liked, but they weren’t travelling down the canvas as fast as I would have liked, and the hair dryer made the wax run unpredictably in weird directions. So I put the hair dry under the canvas and made it hot enough that I could draw on the canvas with the white crayons and it would melt into the background. I also used this method to shape the candle flame and added some red streaks to it.

I wish I’d taken pictures of the process so you could see it on its long journey from black canvas with a white bit, to invisible candle, to cracked candle, to semi-decent/visible candle. Unfortunately your stuck with my stories and the end product.

P.S. Zoe’s was supposed to be the iris of an eye, but it also did not go according to plan and things got a bit crazy. Still looks cool.