Painting with melted crayons: My Preschooler's Self-Portrait Kids Activities Blog

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Our kids love to draw and have literally hundreds and hundreds of crayons over here, many of them mere shards. We’ve melted the crayons to create “new” crayons, but today I had a new “plan” for our leftovers. Several months ago I saw a post by Suzy’s Sitcom where she melted crayons and then painted the wax onto fabric, then painted over that to create a crayon resist work of art – that she said she could sew into projects.

Art with melted crayons:

Obviously, lots of crayon bits
Candle Warmer – we liked this as while it got warm, even hot, it kept the wax cool enough that it didn’t burn us if we accidentally got a little finger in it.
Little Glass Jars
Cheap Paintbrushes
Dark Colored Acrylic Paint – we used brown, for our “garden”.

We heated up the little jars, then painted our wax. As we used a candle warmer to heat the wax we could only warm three small jars at a time, and it took a long time. This meant that our painting project took most of the day. But it was worth it to be “safe”. After the crayon was painted we went over the work with the acrylic paint to make the crayon “pop” out more. I loved the effect!

Colorful Craft:

Unlike Suzy, our crayon painted fabric is not sewable, the crayon/wax flakes off when the artwork bends, but I don’t care! This is going on the wall! My daughter painted us together picking flowers! My son painted himself… as a firetruck?? I don’t know, but he had fun drawing his “fire”. Even my youngest preschooler had fun contributing!