Melted Crayola Canvas

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Last week I helped my daughter make a melted crayon canvas, as she had seen it on Pinterest and wanted to have a go. It turned out well, hey?

©2012 Zoe Ford. Melted crayon canvas.

All you need is a canvas, a hot glue gun, a hair-dryer (or heat gun) and a pack of Crayola crayons (Crayola are the most vivid colours, some other brands are rather transparent). Oh, and a cardboard box!

Space out the crayons along one edge of the canvas, marking with a pencil where they need to go.  Then one by one, hot glue them down. You don't need to remove the paper from the crayons, but you can if you want to.

©2012 Zoe Ford. Crayons on canvas.

Hold the canvas almost upright inside a cardboard box. As you can see from the photo below, using a hair-dryer can get a bit splattery! Put the hair-dryer on the highest setting and point it downwards at the crayons, moving along the row evenly until the crayons start to melt. Once they really get going they will flow like a rainbow waterfall down the canvas really quickly.

©2012 Zoe Ford. Melted Crayon Canvas - Process.

Keep going until you're happy with the results!

A note about hair-dryer versus heat gun:

A hair-dryer's heat spreads out when it hits the canvas, so splattering WILL happen and you need to protect the immediate area from waxy splats, hence the cardboard box. A heat gun, if you have one, will focus its heat in one place, and although I haven't tried it, I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot less mess using one of those.

Do try this, it's FUN! And the canvas looks great on my daughter's bedroom wall.

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