Crayon Melting

It’s been really, really hot here. I’m talking about 110 degree highs every day!   Perfect weather for wax crayon art.   It’s hot enough to melt crayons in my van. Unfortunately, I know this from personal experience. We decided to see how well they would melt outside and experiment with an art project while we were at it.

Art with Melted Crayons

I am going to show you the art of crayon melting and how to have fun with it. Each child placed some wax paper on a white poster board. Then they decorated their wax paper with bits of broken crayons that are too small to draw with anymore. Nicholas made an outline of a house with some grass and the sun shining up above. Once the crayons were placed and a little glitter was added (everything is better with glitter, right?) then the children covered their work with another piece of wax paper. They had to add a few sticks around the edges to keep the top sheet of wax paper from blowing away. Then we let the sun do it’s work. Some of the crayons melted rather quickly. Others took a little longer. It was fun to watch them all ooze and change the look of the art work being created right before our eyes. It was like “living art”.

Melting Crayons Art

Being two years old, Rachel is compelled to touch everything. So of course she had to touch her art work as she saw it moving around on the page. I love letting them be free to test what will happen when they do something new instead of holding them back so they don’t “mess” up their art work. Art is about the process. It is about the act of creating. By experimenting, Rachel came up with a whole new twist to our living art project. Instead of just letting the sun have all the melting fun, we decided to use sticks to draw and design with the melted crayons through the wax paper. I think it turned out beautiful and the blends of colors are much more vibrant than they would have been if Rachel had just let them melt where they had originally been placed. Nicholas liked blending his crayons with a stick.   He decided that his picture which started out as a house now looked like a volcano – grass on the bottom, blue mountain, red/orange/yellow lava. Another example of the beauty of living art that changes it design and focus and outcome as the process unfolds.

 More Crayon Activities:

Like these??   Check out our other crayon activities for kids:

• Make a painting resist by coloring and covering your work with paint.   Easy craft for preschoolers.
• Looking for different ways to fill-in a coloring page?   Cathy has several suggestions.
• You can paint with crayons too – check out the colorful art works our preschoolers created.

Have other ideas?   I’d love to hear about them in the comments!