In the spirit of leprechauns, rainbows, and lucky pots of gold, I thought that it would be fun to create some St. Patrick’s Day-inspired artwork this week. This Melting Crayon Rainbow was a fun change from our usual markers and colored pencils!
Using melted crayons to create artwork is definitely a “thing” on Pinterest and Etsy these days, but I was first introduced to this type of project over the Christmas holidays when my aunt and uncle received a sunflower painting as a gift. The stems of the sunflowers were created by melting green crayons on a canvas! I instantly filed the idea away because I knew that my boys would love to do something similar.
When I looked into the actual method for creating “melting crayon art,” I quickly realized that it can be a time-consuming endeavor. Since I’m dealing with very young children (and therefore short attention spans), I scaled down our project to a much smaller canvas. I decided to use a scrap of foam core board (measuring about 7 inches wide) that was left-over from our previous Wild West Collages.
In addition to the canvas, you only need a handful of supplies:
– A narrow canvas or panel of foam core board (about 7 inches wide)
– A 24-pack of crayons
– A hot glue gun
– A hairdryer
– Regular glue
– Gold glitter
– Cotton balls
This is a very easy project, but as I mentioned earlier, it can be time-consuming if you choose to make a BIG piece of art. My narrow panel required about 10 minutes of blowing the hairdryer onto the crayons, so a large canvas would take about an hour (and would obviously require many more crayons).
Here’s how we did it!
I started with this 24-pack of crayons from Walmart:
I picked out the colors that I wanted in my rainbow, and then used a hot glue gun to attach them to the top of my board.
Later, I had to rummage through my closet to unearth the hairdryer that I haven’t used in, oh, about 3+ years (you know, since I’ve had children). I knew that it would eventually be good for something!
The boys thought that this part was fun. We just tilted the board and took turns pointing the hot air towards the tips of the crayons. They began to melt almost instantly.
Once our “rainbow” was complete, we spread some glue onto the lower half of the board so that we could add our “gold” to the end of the rainbow.
We then glued on a few clouds (cotton balls) at the base of our rainbow and our masterpiece was complete! A St. Patrick’s Day rainbow with a lucky pot of gold at the end! I like to think of this as “abstract art.” 
