DIY Tuesdays: Crayon Art

Who’s ready for a new weekly post? Yep, me! Welcome to DIY Tuesdays!
Today, armed with my box of Crayolas and my purple hairdryer, I attempted…

My boyfriend Chris found this whole endeavour mightily entertaining, saying that we had become “The Ultimate Hipsters”, and I’m not sure I can disagree. We sat there in our Converse sneakers ready to melt some crayons on to a canvas, armed with my Nikon for photo-taking and my iPhone for time-lapse-taking. As if to top it all off, we made sure the iPhone was properly balanced by wedging it between two mason jars. Cue groans.

Anyway, this quick project requires very little preparation, with the only necessary equipment being as follows:

– Crayons (we went through about 40 crayons for our canvas).
– Hot glue gun.
– Newspaper
– Canvas, any size will work fine.
– Hair dryer or heat gun.

I couldn’t help but be excited. I have seen so many pieces of crayon art on the Internet over the last few years and, after getting semi-sick of seeing them clog up my Pinterest feed, I had vowed never to lay my eyes on another one again. Until I picked up the box of crayons from Spotlight this afternoon, then I was like a child on Christmas morning.
You can’t deny there is something really lovely about making something yourself.

My first tip is to not ignore the newspaper in that list of equipment. You’re going to need it. I was not prepared for how messy crayons could be, but messy they are. It also helps if you hold the edges of the newspaper down with rocks or paperweights, as the hair dryer will make the pages fly everywhere!
Make sure you place the newspaper underneath and all the way around your canvas, and ensure that the clothes you’re wearing aren’t super-fancy, because there is a possibility you will be splashed with crayon and I cannot vouch for how easy that is to get out of fabric.

So once you’ve got your newspaper out and you’re all dolled up in your finest daggy attire, apply your hot glue to the crayons and stick them to your canvas. We went for the plain-old straight line thing, but I have seen some people make hearts, circles or words out of the crayons and it works superbly. Go wild.

Put them in any arrangement you wish: we went for a plain old rainbow, but I feel like mixing the colours up would also look great, as would only focussing on a few colours, like green and blue.

Then… get blowing! Make sure your hair dryer (or heat gun) is on the hottest setting. We had the hair dryer blowing at full-force, but that did make the crayons splatter a bit. If you’ve got a bit more patience and want the colours to run down a bit more instead of out, definitely try a lower speed.

Watching the crayons melt and run is honestly brilliant, if you’re a bit easily entertained, like me.

At this point, it’s really up to you how far you go with the melting. You can keep going until the colour fills the page, or do what we did and stop after a while to leave some blank canvas at the bottom, to create a bit of contrast.

See how the crayons have spattered on the bottom half of the canvas? It looks great!

The finished product is awesome, and I love the way the crayons dry with a raised texture. At this point, you can carefully remove the crayons if you want and even draw a design in the blank space, but I like the look of ours with the crayons left on.

And there you have it – hang it up in your home, give it to someone, donate it, or put it in the fire and do a ceremonial burning if it turned out terribly. If it did, I take no responsibility.

Thanks for reading the first ever RoaFR DIY Tuesdays post, you legend!

HollyXO

Have you ever made crayon art? How did it turn out?