Sunshine Melted Crayon Art

Now that we are all starting to enjoy the sun again, I thought I would share a solar-inspired art project.  I wanted to try melted crayon art with my son, but wasn’t really interested in the ever-popular rainbow of melted crayons.  Instead we decided to make a small art piece for his room with broken crayons.

We scrounged through the crayon bin and pulled out all the broken yellow, orange, and red crayons.  We also picked out duplicate crayons…who needs more than one maize crayon anyway?  We had no trouble at all finding enough crayons for this project.  I swear crayons multiply overnight, because I am pretty sure I only bought my kids one box, but now it seems like they have hundreds.

To get the crayons ready for melting all the wrappers had to be peeled off.  This is actually a pretty daunting task.  A few crayons into picking at the paper wrappers, I got out my xacto knife and slit the wrappers.  I didn’t mind if I cut the crayon a bit, knowing I could just use the cut side down for the art project.  Cutting the wrappers off saved a ton of time.

With all the crayons naked, we arranged them in a circle around a drinking glass.  The glass was a guide for arranging the crayons.  We broke the full crayons in half.  We varied the colors and crayon lengths to make suns rays.  We played around until we got just the right look.  With the glass still in place as a guide, I used a line of low-temp hot glue on the back of each crayon and adhered them to a 9 x 12 canvas.

Then came the fun part.  We cut open a brown paper bag and laid it on the table.  Holding the canvas at an angle, we used my hairdryer to melt the crayons.  We applied heat to a small section at a time, until the crayons started melting and the wax blew out to the edges of the canvas.  We rotated the canvas as we went, so the crayons were always melting away from the center.  My son was super excited to use my blow dryer for his art project.

Once the melting was complete, we laid the canvas flat to dry.  The melted crayon will set pretty quickly, but just to be safe we set ours aside overnight to dry.  A few of the crayons came loose from the canvas after the melting process.  I used the low-temp hot glue to reattach them.

The almost perfect white circle in the center was just screaming for something.  I wanted to put a message or quote, but only had a few inches to work with.  I decided on a simple inspirational word to go along with the sun shape.  I used Martha Stewart double-stick letters to apply the word S-H-I-N-E.  I sprinkled bronze glitter over the stickers.  Shine seemed like a perfect inspirational message for a young boy.

The melted crayon art has found a home on my son’s dresser.  It leans casually against the wall next to his mirror.  I love how the bright orange pops against his blue dresser and grey-green walls.

Have you ever tried melted crayon art?  I honestly may have had more fun with it than my son.  It was surprisingly simple and not as messy as I imagined.

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