Monday 6 August 2012

Melted crayon art...

So this all started when I stumbled upon this blog/artwork one day... Melted crayons! Who would have thought. This artist had used green, brown, and yellow crayons to appear like stems and grass, and added flowers to make it look amazing! ... Well, I didn't want to copy the exact thing, so thought about how I could do it differently...

To prepare for such an artwork, I needed crayons... Sam's Warehouse sold them in 64 packs for less than $2! Fantastic!

I came home and decided I'd sort them into 'cold colours' and 'warm colours' :) And, since I already had some spare canvases, I chose a little square one, and lined up the 'warm' crayons in a row, in order (well what I thought the order was) of colour warmth.

Since it was a little canvas, I needed to trim the ends of the crayons so there would be enough room for them to melt properly. And because I like everything neat and tidy, I had to remove the wrappings, because they weren't all the same colour!


After I had glued them onto the canvas (with PVA glue), I trimmed the bottoms again, so that they were all in a straight line, as it appeared that when I trimmed them at first, I wasn't as exact as I thought (or the crayons were all different sizes?). But, that was fine. I used a big knife to slowly carve the rest until they were as even as I could get them :)


Then I set up the canvas upside down in the comfort of my bathroom (the hair dryer lives in there, and I didn't want Jonathan investigating what I was doing just yet!) ... I plugged it in and started heating the crayons! ... It didn't take long before they started to drip. Yay :)


Soon enough, the crayons were dripping right down the canvas, some joining and merging colours, some just dribbling by themselves... But because it was only a small square canvas, I needed to stop sooner than I really wanted! This was FUN!


There appeared, though, to be ONE stubborn crayon that just didn't want to drip :( In the space of a small amount of time I'd decided that I wasn't going to also be stubborn! ... When the rest of the melted crayon had dried, I trimmed off excess melted crayon that either dripped too far, or dripped over the side or top - which really was the bottom :)

Things I would do differently if I were to do this again (which I just might, using my 'cool' coloured crayons):
- Have the hair dryer on low heat & low blow, instead of high heat & low blow
- Maybe, actually, use a heater instead?
- I also wonder if using better quality crayons (like maybe $4 ones) would make a difference with what the dried melted versions look like... Hmm!

Anyway... Time to decorate!! You thought that was it, didn't you? :)

In my mind, I had imagined this with a wooden border or some twine tied around the crayons... So I searched in my linen closet (of course) for something that I could use for a possible border... To which I found nothing really, so I decided to leave that part for now and continue. So I got the twine, and wrapped it around and around the middle of the crayons. Yay! :)


After showing this to a friend, I was told it looked a bit like fire! Hmm... Better hang it quickly to give the illusion of warmth through Winter ;)

No comments:

Post a Comment