Melted Crayon Art with a Disney Twist!

If you're new to Pinterest, chances are you've seen melted crayon art. It's a bunch of crayons lined up in a row, melted onto a canvas. It's a fun rainy-day activity for your kids. SunflowerStoryTime shows the basics of how it's done in this post but I decided to put my own little twist on it. After seeing "Saving Mr. Banks", Mary Poppins had been on my mind and I decided to incorporate her in the design. I just Google-imaged "Mary Poppins silhouette", picked one I liked, and cut it out.

You'll need the basics to make this:

1. Crayons
2. A hot glue gun and glue (I used 1 stick)
3. A hair dryer
4. A canvas
5. A silhouette (optional)

I recommend you remove all the labels from the crayons, though it's certainly up to you. I'm a little OCD and if all the labels weren't perfectly lined up, it would have bothered me so I figured it was easier to remove them altogether. Depending on the size of the canvas, you'll want to lay out all the crayons first before gluing anything down, so you know just how many to use. I ended up using 43 crayons, which was almost the entire box!

Next, take your hot glue, glue right onto the canvas, and then place your crayon on top. I don't recommend doing it the other way around because the glue doesn't stick well and ends up melting the crayon.

Once all your crayons are glued down, take your canvas to an area that you're not afraid of getting wax on. I decided to lean the canvas against the bathroom wall with paper towel underneath, which was a good idea because the wax melted all the way to the bottom and I did get some wax on the tiles by accident. So if you're near expensive furniture, carpet, or animals, you might want to relocate.

Keep the hair dryer roughly 12" above the crayons and after a couple minutes, they will begin to melt. Be careful when moving the hair dryer around or you'll start to spray wax on your walls!

Once you're done melting your wax, take your silhouette and hot glue it to the canvas. I made the mistake of not leaving enough room for Mary so she's a bit cramped in the corner.

Also, if you put a paper towel under the canvas and the melted wax touched the paper towel, you may have some of the paper towel stuck to the bottom of the wax so gently remove that. However, I kinda like it - wherever you sit the canvas, it'll looks like the wax is on that surface!

And voila! Your work of art is complete!

TOTAL COSTS: About $12
$4.11 for a 14x18 canvas panel from Utrecht
$5.99 for 64 Crayola crayons from Vons
Hot glue gun and hair dryer already on hand


TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: 1 hour
40 minutes to remove 43 crayon labels
11 minutes to hot glue crayons to canvas
9 minutes to melt wax

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 2 out of 5
It's not difficult, per se, but if you're not careful, you could easily get wax everywhere and the clean-up would not be fun. So the one thing you should keep in mind is how close your blow dryer is to the canvas and how many Lysol wipes you have on hand for cleaning up!