Melting Crayons While Ruby Naps

If you have been on pintrest you have seen the melted crayon art. Its colorful,whimsical, and different.  The captions read "hair dryer+crayons= beautiful art!". I think they are super cute and as I can never find anything in stores I like for decorating my little Ruby 's room room I decided to give it a try.  Let me just warn you, it takes longer than you think it will, requires some attention to detail, and you may need more than one pack of crayons.

if you are wanting to do this you will need:

canvas

crayons

hair dryer

drop cloths (it gets splashy)

hot glue gun

painters tape(for your word or design)

patience

I got a crayola 64 pack and a canvass and when Ruby went down for the afternoon I went to work.  I dumped my crayons out on my new table and tried to sort by color. There are these amazing crayon melts that look like the rain or a tree or the curtains of a stage respectively but considering that I bought a relatively large canvass (it was on sale two for one) I did not have enough of one specific color family to do anything like that.  I wasn't about to buy five packs of crayons for this one project, so I decided to melt with all the colors of the wind.
      I hot glued them to the top of the canvas in color order, looking back now there are a couple of shades I would have pulled, anything with a brown look to it, if you aren't careful they overpower the pretty vibrant colors and make things look muddy.  Some people take the crayons out of the wrappers, I didn't and it seemed to work fine but to each their own.
     I taped my word with blue painters tape on the canvas. I made sure all the edges were pressed down, I had to fiddle around with what word I was using and placement, painters tape isn't exactly nimble,someone with more patience and skill might be able to make flowing script with it, I am not that person.  Make sure that in your word you leave space for the max to run over so that when the tape is removed your message will be clear.

     After that it was straight on to the drop cloth and fire up the hair dryer.  I started with the hairdryer on hot /low very close to the crayons, holding the canvass upright. This first bit seemed to take an eternity because you are literally staring at crayons waiting for something to happen. You will see the wrappers begin to change color when the crayon starts to sweat.
     After trail and error I kept the dryer about 4 to 6 inches away from the crayons aimed at their middle pointing down on hot/high swaying the dryer back and forth in a 6 inch swath, once the wax starts to run you will see how going back and forth can keep the dryer from blowing the wax in a slanty direction.
   Pay attention to the drips, if the drips seem like they are flying willy nilly over the canvas adjust your hairdryer to encourage them to go straight down.
     This particular stage takes forever, particularly if you have a bigger canvas and a word that you need to make sure is properly coated.  Mine took about 45 minutes but that was with my fiddling around trying to find a grove so you might be able to do in in 30

     Once I was satisfied that my word was coated I shut off my hair dryer and let the canvas be for a second to make sure everything was dry before I moved it or touched it.
    When it was ready (about 10 minutes after I stopped applying heat) I took a pair of tweezers and an exacto knife to help me peel my painter's tape word off. When possible i lifted the tape with the tweezers or my hands , ensuring all tape was removed, the more I peeled the happier I was with the results.  However there were some letters that had places thickly covered with wax that wouldn't come up without disturbing the wax around it. I lightly traced the exacto knife around words that looked too covered and the slid the knife under the tape to begin pulling it off.  BE VERY CAREFUL with the exacto knife, you do NOT want to puncture the canvass (or your self).
  After pulling off the word (if you did one ) you are done all that is left to do is hang it up! I was very happy with he way mine turned out and it has made be think of other melty crayon projects i might want to do, varying the colors and the canvas size... if you do one please send a picture I would love to see the variations that everyone comes up with!