DIY art

Ok, I’m finally going to write a DIY post- I know, it’s been a little while.

So has anyone seen the crayon art kicking around Pinterest lately?  When I first saw that I was like “I can do that!!  It’d be so fun in a kid’s room!!  Oh wait, we don’t have kids.  Hmmm.”  Then I saw this one, and thought it’d be a different twist, plus something I could hang in a guest room.

This turned out to be a pretty cheap project.  I got two 2-packs of 11×14 canvases from Hobby Lobby**- they were $5.99 per pack and 30% off on top of that.  I also picked up some silk flowers- two single stemmed gerbera daisies and a bouquet of orange/yellow/pink/purple daisies- these were all 50% off, so my total at Hobby Lobby was just under $16.  Then I went to Office Max** and picked up some crayons.  I did this project right around the time school was starting again, and I got a super great deal on crayons.  I knew I’d need a lot, especially because I was only planning on using the greens/yellows/oranges.  Crayolas are expensive- and Office Max’s biggest box was 64, for around $5 a box.  Eek.  I happened to walk by a display that had generic brand crayons (eh- a crayon is a crayon right?  especially when using it for melting, not coloring) that were 2 boxes for $3 (!!!!).  I snatched up 8 boxes for just over $12 and ran out of the store (well, I paid for them first of course…)

I then spent the next 4 years hours peeling the labels off my crayons.  I really didn’t care for the labels being on the crayons, and since it’s a guest room, I didn’t want it to look too childish.  This was quite a bit of work, but worth it in the end, I think.

After I finished peeling, I lined up my crayons along the bottom of my canvases, in a random assortment of colors, and hot glued them all down. (Leave it to me to once again not take “during” photos…sigh). Then I took them outside and used my blow dryer to make them melt!  I found out that the higher the speed, the more the wax spatters on your canvas, so go slow when applying heat to your crayons.  And you have to hold your hair dryer pretty close to the crayons to get them to melt.  After I was done melting, I just popped the flowers off the stems and glued them onto the canvases.

Want to see the finished product?

Tada!  Excuse the unmade bed- our kitties have been sleeping up here lately and they get fur everywhere…

I also made one using just blue/grey/silver crayons- I thought it turned out pretty neat as well:

I love the way the silver looks melted

And an up-close:

Here you can see some crayon spatters, but I was able to cover a lot of them up with the flowers

  What do you think?  I thought it was a fun, easy, relatively cheap project- under $30 for 4 pieces of art for that room.  Plus hours of endless entertainment peeling crayons right?  Haha.

Has anyone else out there attempted their version?

**Disclosure:  I was not paid or compensated in any way by this company for this post.