melted crayon art

I saw this idea on pinterest last year and bought a cheap canvas from the 'works' with the plan to do this.  It's a great craft as it uses up all the broken crayons that lie around the house and all the free ones you collect at restaurants (OK so McDonald's and Morrison's!) that float around your handbag. My children had already peeled the paper off most of the ones I was using making it easy to get started.  I printed off some images off the internet, cut them out and stuck them down with prit-stick. In hindsight, grease proof paper may be better to help prevent leakage if you want clean lines.  I wanted to melt the wax over the top of the paper and then remove it later but normal printer paper didn't stick down too well but i was afraid of not being able to remove it at a later date so some experimenting may be required to find the best solution here.

I selected a wave shape for the bottom and so picked out all the blues and greens and placed them at the bottom of the canvas.  I soon realised they needed to taped in place loosely and then the fun began.  My 4 year old helped with melting the crayons by simply using a hairdryer and patience.  The latter didn't last long so I took over and tried to melt the crayons without blowing the wax too far away from the wave area.  I added other clusters of crayons of similar colours in other positions on the canvas and continued melting them until the whole canvas was coated.  I had to wait for it to dry (always the hardest part!) before attempting to peel the printed images off the canvas.

The paper was under quite a lot of wax and so i needed to use a play doh spatula/ knife to help remove the paper but in the process, i took off some of the wax.  I felt the writing wasn't clear enough and so used black paint to fill in the words and outline the waves and fish.

I felt it was still a little flat and undefined so I had a raid of my craft stores and selected a few sparkly things to add. I was talking to my sister on what's app and sent her updates and it was her suggestion to add the seed beads.  I started with gold beads for the fish and then some silvery blue for the froth of the waves.  I used a thick PVA which seems to have worked well to keep them in place.  I painted a little wooden heart in gold paint and added 2 little bronze flowers and a button to also add to the sparkle.  I had a charm in the shape of a heart which said made with love which I used for the dot of the 'i' and lastly added a big yellow flower.  I actually had lots of other embellishments to add but felt it was getting a bit over the top so stopped here.

I love that it's not perfectly neat but totally unique.  It's currently hanging next to the front door but may not stay there but we'll try it there for now.  Lydia came back for some more melting fun so I used up the rest of the black paint and quickly painted her a picture for her to finish although it did get a little crumpled.  

 We added some jewels in the tree to brighten it up and then some gold paint highlights.  Despite her expression here, she is quite pleased with her picture which can now hang in her new room which does now contain a wardrobe and bunkbeds finally.  But that is for another post....