Crayon art

I finally got sucked into pinterest a few weeks back (you can check it out here).  Basically, it is a digital bulletin board.  You can 'pin' things that you find online and sort them so that they are organized.  Then you follow others who have similar tastes and it becomes a big swap meet of cool ideas.  I'm (of course) addicted and I've been trying all kinds of new projects.  This was the first one and I'm very excited and proud of it.

OK, spoiler alert, here is the finished product:

This was my inspiration on pinterest (the website is here):

I have been taking a painting class and had recently gone through the painful process of making my own elaborate color wheel.  Sort of like this one:

So with those on my mind, I decided to do a crayon color wheel.  In chatting with my art teacher, she mentioned that big globs of melted crayon might come off the canvas, so I knew I wanted my melted crayon to be thin to prevent that.

Step 1: buy a canvas
Step 2: draw a circle on the canvas so you have an even guide of where to glue the crayons

I know, helpful right?  I already did a sort of trial setup with my crayons so I knew about how big it needed to be based on how many crayons I wanted had on hand.  You'll see that I marked the circle with some guidelines to help keep it even.  Those guidelines included 3 spots (at clock positions 12, 4, and 8) for my primary colors to anchor the circle.

Here is that circle a little further out so you can see what my dimensions looked like:

Step 3: Lay out your crayons so you have them in the right positions and ready to go

For me, I decided to go with 3 of each primary and secondary color and 2 of each in between color (2 in between tones between each primary-secondary space. (translation, Primary: red, blue, yellow; Secondary: purple, green, orange; In betweens, blue-blue-green, blue-green-green, green-green-yellow, green-yellow-yellow, yellow-yellow-orange, yellow-orange-orange, orange-orange-red, orange-red-red, red-red-purple, red-purple-purple, purple-purple-blue, purple-blue-blue)  Obviously, the crayon colors are not as conveniently named as purple-purple-blue, etc.  You sort of have to play it by sight.

Step 4: get your glue gun ready (I put a piece of glass under the tip to catch any glue drips so I didn't mess up the floor.  I prefer glass to paper because it's less likely to stick to the glue glue when you pick it up.)

Step 4: Glue your center primary color crayons (this is why I had 3 of each of them) down on the marks you made to anchor the circle.

Step 5: Don't be an idiot like me and start with purple before realizing that purple is NOT a primary color.  Guess I got overexcited.  On the plus side, it gave me a chance to see what happened when you screw up and have to pull one off.  The good news: they're decently easy to pull off and the old glue gets hidden, so not the end of the world.

Step 6: Try that whole 'glue down the primary colors center crayon' thing again.  Then glue down the secondary colors in between (clock positions 2, 6, and 10)

Sorry the photo is a bit blurry, but you get the picture I think:

 

Step 7: Repeat for the remainder of the crayons

Now time for the fun part!

Step 7: take your creation to an area that you can get splattered.  This could be inside with drop cloths, or outside, whatever works.  It was a nice day out, so we went to the yard.

 Step 8: get your hair dryer plugged in on its warm/hot setting and turn it on.  Let it heat up a bit before aiming it at the crayons.  That way your first crayons get the same heat burst as the rest.

 

Here's where your artistic side will take over.  How you move that dryer affects what the wax splatter looks like. I moved my wrist side to side fairly rapidly, which is how I also dry my hair.  Turns out, it made an awesome sunburst sort of spray.  I just kept rotating the canvas as I felt like each color was done (to keep the flow going the same direction all the way around).  I even let Bella take a turn at it, which was sort of the whole point initially.  But we were outside, and there were butterflies.  So she went chasing butterflies and I did my dryer thing.  All done, I had a nice light coat of wax.  No globs, and I love it.

Originally I had thought about painting a word in the center of the circle, but after I saw it I decided against it because it's so great by itself.  I'm still considering making a frame out of rulers for the edge, but I like it a lot by itself.  What do you think?

Looking forward to sharing more pinterest projects soon!