Melted Rain

Tags

art mediums, melted crayons

Crayola has been a part of my life since I was a child.  Established in the early 1900’s, Crayola has been providing art mediums for over 100 years — their most popular, the crayon.  Everyone has colored with crayons before, either in school or in a coloring book, but the most recent trend has been to melt the crayon.  So this year, for a Christmas present, I decided to revisit my childhood but with a twist.  I wanted to try to melt crayons into a new art project.

I went to the store and bought three large boxes of crayons and brought them home.  Once I decided that I wanted to make a rain images out of my melted crayons, I picked out all of the shades of blue and started peeling away the paper around each crayon —this part of the project took the longest.

Once the paper was all gone, I was able to line up the crayons in the order that I wanted.  I chose a few purples to break up the solid blue colors.  Once I positioned them I took a hot glue gun, put a little line on the back and stuck the crayon to my canvas board. (the hot glue did melt the crayon at first, but once it cooled a bit it stuck just fine)

I knew in my rain picture, the I wanted to have an umbrella with a couple under it.  So to avoid getting the ‘rain’ where I wanted my people, I just used some masking tape to cover that area.  (Overview photo below)

The next step is to break out your hair dryer. **Make sure you put newspaper or an old rag under your work for this step – crayon wax will run** I thought that this part would go pretty slow, but it took maybe ten minutes.  I also found that holding the hair dryer a few inches away from the crayons and parallel to the ground you don’t get much splatter from the crayons.  This way worked best for me.  Keep melting until you get the desired amount of dripping and mixing!

Once it was all melted – and cooled – I drew out my umbrella scene and couple.  I went with a simple silhouette and made the umbrella a red to contrast the blue crayons.  I used basic acrylic paints for this portion of the project.

I took a step back from my work and I was excited.  My first attempt at melting crayons to make something specific worked.  It was fun and exciting as I didn’t know exactly what my result would be but that kind of excitement is always fun.