So, What Happened Was...: Crayon Canvas Art

I saw it on Pinterest and thought "this is the coolest thing EVER and I HAVE to have one on the wall at the end of my hall between the kids' rooms. That's right, it's the melted crayon canvas!

So I looked around until I found this awesome tutorial on the Whatever blog (seriously, check that blog out. I need more hours in a day so I can do all that cool stuff).

Basically, you just hot glue crayons to a canvas and heat them with a hair dryer until they get all melty and splatter or drip down your canvas. Then you hang it up and go blog about it! Yay!

You are going to need:

A canvas (I got a 2 pack of 16 x 20 at Hobby Lobby for $7.99. The other one is going to be a memo board. Woooo!)
Some crayons (I got a 96 pack, but it had some funky ones in there that I didn't use.) I only ended up needing 60ish (I forget exactly how many), but that was ok because I didn't have to use the weirdo colors and I didn't want any repeats anyway.
Hot glue gun
Hair dryer

The players. Minus the hair dryer.

First you want to dump all the crayons out and sort them into ones you are going to use for sure, ones you might use if you need some more, and ones you are definitely not using. Get rid of the browns. Just trust me. Brown melted wax looks like a giant splatter of poo. Unless this is a canvas for your bathroom...well even then. Take them out.

Crayons come all mixed together in the box. Why don't they color coordinate them?

Figure out how you want them on the canvas and line them up. Stand the canvas up in front of your line to make sure you have enough crayons.

I put mine in the good ol' Roy G. Biv pattern. But really anything you like would be pretty. Even a monochromatic scheme or an alternating rainbow with only a few colors.

I unwrapped my canvas and got ready to glue.

My canvas had these little shiv things in a baggy attached to the back. I mean, I get that they probably go in those slots, but what the heck are they for?!

I put 2 lines of hot glue about 3 inches long and stuck my crayons to the edges of my board. I'm not very fast with the hot glue, so if you can work quickly, you could obviously put longer lines.

I took a couple pictures while in progress, but my camera ate them somehow. Basically, I got halfway down the canvas and thought I was getting it a little sideways, so I started working on the other end and let it meet in the center. It turned out well.

Yeah, one of those fish bowl pictures. The camera has a setting for it - might as well use it once in a while!

Now for the fun part - using the hair dryer to melt the wax!

This took about 20 minutes start to finish. Once they start melting, they melt fast! I used high heat on low setting because I wanted a blended look. If you want a drippy look you might want to choose a lower heat so you have a little control over what starts melting when. I don't recommend you do this on a day there is any wind whatsoever because the melted wax is very sensitive to air movement.