Hello artists! Thank you to those of you who have been in touch and shared the art they are enjoying – it’s lonely here without you all! In keeping with the theme of using what we have easy access to, this week’s art exploration will be melting crayon art. If your house is like ours, the accumulation of crayons of all shapes and sizes abound so let’s find some fun ways to make art with them. For most of our projects we used a hot plate covered in tin foil but you could also use an electric skillet or a cookie sheet heated in the oven.
The first thing we did was experiment with drawing on different types of paper – copy paper, card stock, construction paper, just to see how it felt and what different effects we could achieve. We drew, we made pools of wax that we blew on to make designs, we swirled and twirled the papers.
It was VERY satisfying!
Next, we wanted to try and make a textile print. A textile print is made by creating an original on a non textile surface and transferring it to a textile (in our case a t-shirt). Since we had not done this before, we set up a test with an old rag first and using our crayons, drew directly on the aluminum foil covered hot plate. After placing the rag on top and patting on it, the image transferred!
I didn’t get any pictures of the process in our final piece but here is the end product. You can see that Grif is quite happy with it!
Finally we decided to explore with melting crayon pieces. Believe it or not, I already had these leftover crayons that I had grated and chopped up from another project so we were ready to go. It’s not a tough task, just takes a little time with an old cheese grater. Watch your fingers!
This next one you may have tried before with a clothes iron (at least that’s how I had done it previously) but this time we used our trusty hot plate lined with aluminum foil but this time we added a piece of waxed paper, sprinkled some crayon shavings and topped with another piece of waxed paper. We pressed on it as it was melting to create some cool effects, first with our fingers, but that got too hot so we used popsicle sticks and markers to move the wax. We finished them off by cutting out frames for them to create stained glass.
We also tried melting our pieces on recycled plastic….
Griffin went abstract
And I drew a shape with Sharpie on the opposite side
We think this had some real possibilities that we are going to experiment with some more!
There are so many more things to do with melting crayons (some of you first graders may remember how we dripped melted crayon to create pointillism art last year?) so please let me know if you try anything else that you really enjoy!
I would love to hear from you! Parents or students can email me directly at andrea@newmorningschool.com or text at 248 943 2655. Would you like to join my Art Google Classroom? Would you be interested in an Art Zoom meeting? I’d love to share in some art time or dialog if you’d like to try and set something up. Until then – keep creating!
Ms Andrea
