Melted Crayon Wall Art

Just like everyone else, I enjoy browsing Pinterest instead of doing anything more productive or important with my life. Sometimes I reward myself with 5 minutes of Pinterest time for every 30 minutes of studying, which quickly turns into 30 minutes of Pinterest time and 5 minutes of studying.

Anyway, this weekend I made melted crayon wall art.  I googled some examples, but I didn't really like anything that I saw, I mean, who wants a giant rainbow crayon thing on their wall? Not me. So, I picked out some colors that I liked to go with my "new" second-hand yellow couch.  I'm planning on having a yellow and turquoise palette for my front room, which I guess is supposed to be a formal living room, but what is currently what I call the "Random Room" because it's where I put my random stuff. 

The melted crayon picture turned out pretty well. I am pleased with it. However, it took F-O-R-E-V-E-R. I mean, it seems simple the way I've seen it explained: glue or tape crayons down, and then melt them. Super easy, right?  For me, not so much.  My background was a 30 x 40 foam board, so I needed a 40'' piece of cardboard to glue my crayons onto. All I had around the house was a bunch of Amazon boxes some packages had come in, so I ripped off parts of those and taped them together until they were long enough. This ended up working quite well.

Next, I glued down the crayons.  I used no semblance of order whatsoever, just picked out all the blue, green and yellow crayons out of 3 64-pack boxes of Crayolas, put them in a pile, and glued them down willy-nilly.  This part was not so bad, except the glue from the hot glue gun I bought ($2.99 for a mini one at Hobby Lobby!) was super stringy and kept getting caught on my hands and in my hair. 

I propped the foam board up on an angle against a table, and then tried to figure out how I was going to get the crayons pointing downwards so they would drip down the foam board.  I'm sure someone has a better way to do this, but I just propped the crayon/cardboard up with a few of those big 3-wick candles so it was kind of at an angle over the foam board.  This worked out for about 10 minutes, and then fell down, and proceeded to fall down repeatedly, each time knocking a bunch of the crayons off, so I'd have to glue them back on again. Sigh. 

Melting the crayons was the worst part by far. Blue crayons, for some reason, melt much more slowly than green and yellow, and the darker blue colors do not melt at all. It also takes a REALLY long time to hair-dryer-melt 40 inches of crayons. It took me about 3 hours with my blow dryer (in half an hour or so chunks because I kept getting bored and going to do something else) total, and only the green, yellow and about half of the blue crayons melted onto the board, and all of those only melted about 1/3 of the way down. Sigh again. So, I had to do even MORE blow-drying to melt the wax more to make it go all the way down the board. I would suggest when doing your melting to make sure you blow-dry the wax all the way down the board the FIRST time, like I did not. 

The un-melted blue crayons really stumped me. Why blue? Are they depressed and didn't feel like melting? I don't understand. So I took the un-melted ones, took the papers off, put them in a bowl and microwaved them for 2 minutes, and NOTHING!  Nothing happened! Not a single melter!  Then I microwaved them for 5 minutes and that got them good and melty, but my little glass bowl broke (I guess it wasn't microwave safe). Then I spooned on the melted blue ones in the places where I wanted darker blues. The first picture I wasn't totally happy with, so I ended up adding even more blue to the sides. 

Overall, this pretty much took me a total of about 6 hours.  The frame is just a plain black frame from Hobby Lobby, which was about $40. Total project cost was about $100. Crayons are expensive, and now I have a glut of red, orange and purple, which I'll have to find something to do with. The foam board probably wasn't the best choice since it got a little wavy and bent from the heat and moisture of the melted wax.  I think those big artist's canvases would work better, but I wanted to put mine in a frame.

Additionally, I feel I should mention that wax got EVERYWHERE: on my pants, under my fingernails, on the floor (and I put plastic underneath to catch spills!), and all over my crappy hairdryer, which gave me an excuse to go buy a new one. 

I also sprayed it with some clear-coat spray paint when I was done so it would be a little shinier.  See, isn't it pretty?