Melting Crayons on a Canvas

I've been drooling over those amazing melted crayon art pieces for several weeks now.   To anyone who has the internet or has a friend who owns the internet this is probably old hat, but I've finally gotten around to it myself so I thought I'd share.

I already have this awesome piece hanging on my wall so the idea was to do something along the same lines.

No, I didn't steal this from my sister.  Why would you ask that?

See for my Christmas present my sister's fiance and I got together to make some negative space art.  We used little packets of serrated washers from home depot so if you look close the little circles actually appear to be gears.

You just arrange the 'gears' on the canvas in an interesting pattern  and then spray paint over them.

They were a ton of fun to make.

Of course, I tried to get too fancy with mine, and it didn't actually turn out.

That canvas is still actually in my closet, and I intend to apologize to it someday and give it another go.

But we're talking about my new art piece now so I should probably roll that baby out.

please hold your applause until the end of the program

My original intent was to get the color to look like it was oozing from the gears themselves.  But because there was some splatter* and uncontrolled leaking of wax there's too much color above the black bits for that to be the obvious case.

Still, unpredictability is part of the entire point of a medium like this.

And my friend wanted to melt these out.  For Shame!

And you know what?  I love it.   I love that how the wax amalgamating several inches below the gears creates a second line that draws the eyes across the canvas.

I even love how the garbage bag I placed underneath the piece while I was blow drying got bunched up so there are these little ridges a half inch above the bottom of the piece

If you're thinking about trying this I say go for it! It really was the most fun I've had in a while

Now I just have to find somewhere to hang the darn thing.

My next post will show how I did the gears themselves.  It was drawn out and overcomplicated so I feel like you should all appreciate that as well. 

*Mr. Clean's magic eraser really does get crayon off the wall.