Color Me Happy!

As we all know I am addicted to pinterest, so when I saw this I knew I was in trouble.  I never know what I get my grandmothers for Christmas and thought, why not make them some art.  So I waited for canvases to go on sale at Michaels and set about making my art.  A side note for this project, you are more than welcome to use Crayola brand for your crayons, but a 64 pack was about $7, but a 64 pack no-name was $1...thats right $1 so you can tell which one I chose.  What you will need is:

1. Hair dryer
2. Canvas size of your choice
3. Hot glue gun and extra glue sticks
4. Crayons- I used 2 boxes per 12x12 canvas (to get the colors I needed, I have the equilivant of 1 box left over, but its full of colors I didnt use)
5. Decorations, if you so choose
6. newspaper for easy clean up

Let me start by showing you the finished products to get you motivated to do your own.

Yay!  Lets get started!  I decided to do one like grass with flowers and the other like the sky with butterflies flying around.  I also thought this would be the best way to make the most of all the crayons so I ended up with all red/pinks in the extra box..what to do with those :)  To start off with, pick out all the colors you think you are going to want to use and line them up on the canvas.  I dont remember how many crayons I used but it was each color family from 2 boxes (so all the greens/yellows/brown from 2 boxes).  Once you have them all lined up how you like, start gluing them.

I dont know if you can tell from this picture, but when I glued mine down I made sure all the labels were facing the same way.  Since I didnt love the logo on the crayon I had the address line facing out as it had the least amount of text showing.  I tried to rip off the label but they wouldnt budge, you can try it buy it didnt work for me.  Once you have all the crayons glued down, set out your newspaper to start blow drying.  Warning...there is a fair amount of splatter to the back of the canvas and to the side so make sure you put enough newspaper to cover that.  I had a wine bottle that was pretty tall that I perched my canvases on to make the dripping easier for me, but Im sure you could just lean it up against something and that would be fine too.  Here is what it looks like after about 1 minute.

Since this was such a small canvas the whole thing only took about 15minutes per canvas, so not too bad and the color was pretty thick, needless to say I was happy with the results.  I did have some of the crayons get bunched down the middle and if that happens to you just run the blow drier over the parts that are too thick and they will melt down.  Also, I pointed the dryer down and towards the middle of the crayons that seemed to work best for me.  Remember that not all crayons melt at the same pace so be aware of that, I had one that wouldnt melt even after having the dryer on it for 5 minutes, so watch out for that.

Now that the color is all melted let it dry (about 5minutes, this stuff dries fast) and if you have designs, you can add them with the hot glue now.

Those are my finished projects, I love them and am a little sad to see them go, but that just means its time to make my own for my house!!  If you made some awesome crayon art, share I would love to see what inspiration you got!

Project Housewife Out!