Without fail, children and parents love to get their hands dirty from planting flowers to baking cookies to painting! Melting crayons on a canvas is a unique, creative, straightforward and entertaining canvas project you and your little ones can enjoy during the cool fall into chilly winter days. Create a beautiful masterpiece by following the below list.

Materials To Get Started:

1 – Stretched Canvas.  Any size is fine but the preferred size when working with children is 8×10 or 11×14. Craft stores such as Hobby Lobby carry various canvas sizes and shapes fit for all budgets. At times you can find canvases to purchase in bulk which is always encouraged to have on hand.

1 –  Large pack of Crayola Crayons – depending on the canvas length, you’ll need quite a few crayolas to cover the surface. It is suggested to buy crayons in bulk to provide more color options. A box count of 48 – 120 is ideal. Or you can purchase a few boxes of 24 packs.

1 – Hair Dryer with different settings

Newspaper to cover the working surface

Tape – masking or clear packing tape

1. Place all materials out on your workspace – regardless if you’re using a hard surface like a counter or working on the floor. Make sure you cover the surface you’re working on to catch any melted crayon dripping from the canvas.

2. Before starting, pick and choose the desired crayons and line the top of your canvas until you run out of space. Colors do not need to be in any specific order, you can alternate colors or keep crayons batched by color family.

TIP: For this rainbow canvas masterpiece, use the following color palettes: red, orange, yellow, purple, pink, blue and green and place along the top of the canvas in any order you want. Keep in mind as the colors start to melt and drip, they might blend together. Crayola placement – when placing crayons on the canvas, keep in mind you are using a hair dryer to melt the wax and this will cause a dripping effect. At times, the crayon can gush out from the paper. When preparing my canvas, I make sure the crayon is half way off the canvas and half way on it.

3. By now all your crayons are aligned in the color order of your choice.  Using masking or clear packing tape, starting from one end of the crayon line to another, tape down the crayons and wrap the tape around the canvas edges for extra security. Keep in mind you’ll need to remove the tape once finished.

TIP: Packing tape works best for this. Crayons are to touch one another and are secure so when tilting the canvas, there’s no movement or sliding of crayons. Double check the crayons are secure and tightly taped by slightly tilting the canvas forward at an angle.

4. Using the hair dryer on a medium heat and medium power, start melting the crayons evenly distributed air in a back and forth movement. This might take a few minutes to heat so keep patience! You can increase the heat but be careful, as this might get a bit too hot.

5. Once the crayons start to melt, you and your little ones will start having a blast! For extra texture and a bit more fun, feel free to rotate and move the canvas around to allow the colors to spread and sometimes glob together to create really cool textures.

Tip: Rotate and move the canvas slowly so that crayons do not slip out from the tape.

6. Make sure to dry the canvas all over during the melting process. If colors streak halfway down and you want it to spread it a bit more towards the end or spread it to a different location, take the dryer and zone in on the spots you want to melt and cover!

Your masterpiece is completed when you say it is!

Allow thirty minutes to three hours for your canvas to dry. Again, feel free to go back over with the dryer to blend in any areas you think need it. If you just want the colors to run down, no need to do any extra work.

Creating your own rainbow masterpiece is supposed to be a fresh experiment perfect for everyone at any age – give it a try and show us what you got!

This is a guest post from: Lora a freelance writer, art enthusiast and shares a fond love and passion for Balinese cats.