Its Hot. Crayon-Meltingly Hot.

So I've seen a bunch of these on Pinterest and Modern Parents Messy Kids. The concept is simple - and with weather like we've been having on the East Coast, melting crayons is no problem - just look in the cup-holders in my car.

Some things I learned:

How to get the crayons lined up? Some tutorials call for hot-gluing the crayons in a line across the top of your canvas. This will only work if your crayons still have paper labels on them. We decided to use up our old broken crayons, and it was very hard to get the hot glue to stick the raw crayon to the canvas - it tended just to melt the crayon. I did it with the canvas flat then gingerly tipped it up to a very gentle angle, that seemed to keep most of the crayons mostly in place. I think it might work to line them up then tape them carefully across, then remove the tape once they are melted, but I haven't tried that yet.

What angle? Some tutorials also show a very steep angle of the canvas - I found that made the crayons roll down before they could melt. A gentle angle in full sun worked best to let the colors gently run down the canvas but not spread out on our patio (we already call it the frying pan, it was PERFECT for this project). So instead of putting the canvas on our easel as I'd planned, I just used an empty yogurt container to prop up one side, with the whole thing on newspapers to catch the run off.

Other ideas: While I tried to face the canvas directly toward the sun, you can see that one side melted more than the other. Our budding scientists were very interested in this effect. I think it would be fun to do in the future with three smaller boards and angle them in different directions or hang them on the wall so the drips are perpendicular to each other.

Not that our house gets as hot as the sun, but it is hard to know when this art is really "done." It does seem that there is no way to really stop the potential for further art. I plan to add some details to that empty lower right corner, then spray a clear coat on top to preserve it. Other ideas? Guess we'll find out!

I can recommend this project with kids, especially if you have a bunch of old crayons hanging around that aren't very appealing to color with. My kids love making things out of other things and never want me to throw broken things out - so this was a win-win. If you are going to obsess over the crayon color placement then probably get the materials all out before you call the kids over because gluing the crayons on is kind of fussy.

Good luck!