I got the best of the best insider tips from my friends, scoured through different blogs and pictures for ideas of crayon art and was finally ready to try my own, and this is it:
First: You need an idea. I had just recently organized my room (finally!) and I have an area where Aries, my Dalmatian, has her water dish and I have an Arizona Diamondback picture higher up above her bowl but I thought it would be adorable for her to have her own artwork to look at. That's when I thought of the crayon art. I honestly chose to do crayon art for her because I wasn't sure how well it would turn out and she doesn't usually tend to be a harsh critic, so I decided to give it a go.
Second: You need a canvas. I bought a 9 x 12 at Michaels and they were all 50% off the week I went, so I ended up spending $3.57 (You can buy any size you want, just remember bigger canvas, means more crayons needed)
Third: You need crayons. I bought four boxes of eight count crayons also at Michaels for .99 each. (You could have gotten these cheaper and in a bigger box elsewhere, but I wanted some one stop shopping and decided to spend the extra.)
So you then organize your supplies.
You need to decide what colors and in what order you want your final product to look like. I decided I wanted rainbow so that it would be nice and fun. I've seen just blues (representing rain), reds and oranges (for fire), greens (flower stems), etc. however you want it to look.
Sorry this is sideways I couldn't get it to turn and was becoming frustrated!
Once you have your order of crayons it's time to start gluing them down. I used a hot glue gun, made a thin strip, glued down the crayon. I made it so all the Crayola symbols faced out, you can do it however you want, or even take off the wrappers. Instead of a hot glue gun, I've seen blogs where people used E6000, etc Pretty much you can use anything that will stick your crayon down. (Notice in the picture you can see Aries helping me with this step... or maybe she was begging me to put some food in the upside down bowl...)
Now, once all of your crayons are glued down you can just start blow-drying if you want to and you'll have a nice piece of crayon art. I, however, decided to go with the idea of adding a silhouette.
If you're awesome, you can just free hand this. If you're like me, you can trace it. So I traced a tree, and since it's for my dog....
I added a dog and her name. Now my hand really started to hurt after this hard tracing and then filling in. Total time, this took me about two hours, but since it was my first time, I don't consider that too bad.
Okay so this is my finished product. You now need to prepare for the blow drying, you can also use a heating gun if you have one readily available. From reading the other blogs, I read that this part was VERY messy. So I prepared by putting towels underneath my canvas and against the wall. I used everyday scotch tape to cover my silhouette in hopes that the crayon wouldn't drip all over my hard work. And then I was ready to go. I started out with my blow dryer on hot and low speed... nothing happened. I kicked it up to high and hot and the crayons started to melt. I worked in small sections, starting from the right first. If the drips started getting too close to my silhouette I stopped blow drying and the drip stopped pretty quickly. For the areas where I wanted it to drip down farther I applied the most heat. One thing I did discover: Yellow is so, so, hard to melt and really never showed up. I actually ended up scraping off a chunk of the yellow with my fingernail then scraping it further down the canvas and melting it.
And here is my final product. I do like the way it turned out. It did splatter a bit but I pointed my blow dryer straight on at the crayons and then focused the air flow downward and didn't seem to get the huge splatter mess that was mentioned elsewhere. Overall, it really was a fun craft and I would consider doing it again, especially because no two are ever going to look alike.
And of course, every piece of art work needs to be signed.
My Silhouette Crayon Art
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