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!

Paint on Elmer's Glue - Worth It?

Ever see a photo on the internet with a description of what to do and wonder what the final outcome is supposed to look like? Well, I came across this one on Pinterest with the description, "Elmer's glue on canvas. then paint over it." Seemed simple enough, but what did it look like? Well folks, I tried this one out for you and here's what I found:

After glue dries

Before glue dries

First, I took a small canvas and Elmer's glue and tried to make the same design they did. However, I discovered that the thicker the area, the more the details started to melt away. If you try to do this, be careful not use too much glue or it will start to spread.

After waiting 24 hours, I went to see the results... and as you can see in the photos, it doesn't look at all like the first photo. The glue, while 3-D in some areas (mainly the bottom right corner), it was practically invisible in others. So that's problem #1.

Problem #2? If you can't see the glue, how on earth are you supposed to paint over it?! So here's what it looks like if you paint around the glue and here's what it looks like when you paint over.

If you paint around the glue, be sure you have a tiny paintbrush if your glue design was detailed.

If you paint over the glue, you can come up with some fun designs that will (hopefully) end up being 3-D but it's up to you how you want to paint over it. I ended up just swirling the paintbrush around and after it dried, got some nice see-through effects:

Ultimately, I don't think painting over Elmer's glue was the bees knees. I suppose anything you make that could be monogrammed would be a nice gift for someone, but I think you can skip the glue part, especially because it takes so long to dry.

TOTAL COSTS: About $12
$2.99 for 5oz. of Elmer's glue from Michael's
$1.99 for 2oz. bottle of paint from Blick Art Supplies
$6.60 for a 4x6 canvas

TOTAL AMOUNT OF TIME: About 30 minutes + 24 hours to dry
10 minutes to glue design
24 hours to dry
15 minutes to paint

EASY-PEASY SCALE (1 super easy - 5 very difficult): 1 out of 5
But really, unless you're going to use a LOT of glue, this may be one of those things on the internet best left on the internet.