Melted Crayon Menagerie

Melted Crayon art has been going around for a little bit now, but this was the first time I had seen this form of it. Rather than gluing/taping the crayons to the top of the canvas and having the meltings run down, this one uses an iron and crayon shavings. Cool, huh?! I really want to try this out now! Well Lindsay tried it out and it's harder than it looks to get it just right. 

The Original Pin

from: http://www.momtastic.com/home-and-living/home/168730-its-elementary-avant-garde-art-made-with-crayons

Lindsay found the supplies she needed at the local Wally World and eagerly started on her adventure only to run into a few problems. First, the crayons didn't want to come out of their wrappings. She cut them off with an exacto knife and then proceeded to peel them off in tiny strips. Next, she says it quite literally took her hours to grate up the crayons into little shavings as the crayons just wanted to stick in the holes of the grater. But finally she had the crayons grated and decided to get to work on her first piece of crayon art. 

Pinstrosity #1

Lindsay says, "I decided to make a little meadow-y scene for the first one. I had a Monet-type picture imagined. I did not anticipate how much my colors would run together. There's a blob of green in the sky where the sun and the sky mixed. It was a mess."

Pinstrosity #2

Lindsay "decided to just stick to vertical lines for the second one. By the time one part of the picture would melt on the low setting, the part that I had just finished would be solid again. It's hard to see in the picture, but there are giant blobs of hardened crayon because I used way too many shavings."

Pinstrosity #3

"For the third one, I was down to the ugly colors of the crayon box. I usually enjoy red and brown together, but this red was just so red. It ended up looking like a bloody diarrhea disaster. However, I sprinkled VERY fine lines of crayons on this one because I have learned that a little does go a long way when it gets melty. So, if the colors had been better, my last attempt wouldn't have been that bad"

How to Fix This

Lindsay says...

• Use the bigger holes of the cheese grater to kind of shave off little chunks of crayon instead of trying to use the small holes to actually grate them into fine shavings.
• Less is more when it comes to putting the shavings on the canvas. The melted crayon spreads out a lot more than you think it would.
• Unless you want a giant, melted mixture of all of your colors, DO NOT swirl your iron around or move it too much on the canvas. I just held it in one place until that section melted and then moved on to the next section.
• Next time I might see if parchment paper or something else would work without getting melted crayon all over my iron