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Melting Crayons Art: Kid Friendly Pseudo Encaustic by Troy Redington |
We’re major proponents of art and creativity at our house. And everyone in our house has been inspired by Johwey’s adventures in encaustics. A month or two ago, I was melting crayons with a hot iron and using the iron to ‘paint’ in a sketchbook. Rinoa was very interested and really wanted to try it. Sadly, I refused, as a hot iron and liquid wax were already pushing my danger limits. Putting a hot iron into the hands of a 7-year old wasn’t something I was willing to try do (yet).
We did agree to try something similar though. For our first attempt at this pseudo-encaustic art, we wanted to keep it simple. We took a trip to Target, our favorite non-Walmart store, and picked up a couple big boxes of crayons.
Rinoa took out the colors she didn’t want to use, like brown and black, and arranged what was left in a pattern of her choice. Her chosen pattern was essentially a backwards rainbow with a couple white crayons mixed in.
We glued them to the top of a black canvas using normal white craft glue. We took turns glueing each crayon and we played a game of ‘whoever gets the white crayons wins’. She had the ability to see 11 turns ahead and realize that I was going to get the 2nd white crayon, so she made the decision to rearrange the crayons a bit.
After the glue dried, we put the canvas up on an easel and used a hair dryer to melt the crayons and blow the hot wax down the canvas. The melted wax mixed naturally with the neighboring colors and created the effect.
There were no injuries, and the mess we made was minor. The project was a lot of fun and the result is a lovely piece that we’ll cherish almost as much as seeing our creative, innovative, and intelligent children grow up.
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