Personalized Crayon Art

More inspiration from pinterest! There have been tons of crayon art floating around, but most of them are just "melted rainbows". They're cute, but the same. I saw one where it was all blue crayons that looked like rain and a couple under an umbrella. That was so sweet (and expensive! $75!). So, I went to Walmart and got 3 small canvases for $3 and two 64 packs of "Cra-Z-Art" crayons for $2 each. And borrowed my hubbies heat gun.

I decided to do the boys names in the melted crayon. Since Pete's home sick, we did his name first. I let him pick out he colors, with the explicit instructions "No black, no brown, it'll look like poop". Since he has the stomach bug, he got that, and we didn't have any issues :)

I printed out his name, and taped it to painters tape, that I had layered on tin foil. I cut out the letters to make the "negative stencils"



I then attempted to peel the foil off the back. I think next time, I'm going to use wax paper, since that wasn't as easy as I hoped. Then, just place the tape on the canvas, hot glue down the crayons (Pete wanted them on the canvas with all of the color names showing).



Then, I fired up the heat gun on low and let her rip! We went back and forth a few times. Depending on how high on the crayon you apply the heat, it cools at different rates, so you see the "dyed canvas" right at the tip, and the chunkier wax near the bottom. After it cooled a bit, I took a sharp edge and traced the letters to separate the wax. I did lose some (like the insides of the "e"), but, all in all, it worked really well. Pete asked me to outline the letters to make them easier to read, so I grabbed and sharpie, and we ended up with this:



Pete said it's awesome! And it gave us something fun to do on a sick day. I just need to make on for my little kiddo, but I'll let him pick out the colors...