Living Art with Melted Crayons

It's been really, really hot here. I'm talking about 110 degree highs every day!

It's hot enough to melt crayons in my van. Unfortunately, I know this from personal experience. We decided to see how well they would melt outside and experiment with an art project while we were at it.

Each child placed some wax paper on a white poster board. Then they decorated their wax paper with bits of broken crayons that are too small to draw with anymore.



Nicholas made an outline of a house with some grass and the sun shining up above.



Rachel took a more modern art approach with her design.



Once the crayons were placed and a little glitter was added (everything is better with glitter, right?) then the children covered their work with another piece of wax paper. They had to add a few sticks around the edges to keep the top sheet of wax paper from blowing away.

Then we let the sun do it's work.

Some of the crayons melted rather quickly. Others took a little longer.



It was fun to watch them all ooze and change the look of the art work being created right before our eyes. It was like "living art".



Being two years old, Rachel is compelled to touch everything. So of course she had to touch her art work as she saw it moving around on the page. I love letting them be free to test what will happen when they do something new instead of holding them back so they don't "mess" up their art work. Art is about the process. It is about the act of creating.



By experimenting, Rachel came up with a whole new twist to our living art project. Instead of just letting the sun have all the melting fun, we decided to use sticks to draw and design with the melted crayons through the wax paper.



I think it turned out beautiful and the blends of colors are much more vibrant than they would have been if Rachel had just let them melt where they had originally been placed.



Nicholas liked blending his with a stick but it no longer looked like a house once he was done. I love this picture where he made a discovery that his house now looked like a volcano with lava spewing down the sides.



Another example of the beauty of living art that changes it design and focus and outcome as the process unfolds.

We let the pieces cool inside and then hung them on the wall for Daddy to see when he gets home. Some of the yellow sun had not melted enough to make a good seal with both layers of wax paper so shortly after we hung it on the wall, the front layer of wax paper detached from the sun crayons and flopped forward.



Nicholas never once got sad. He was excited as he looked at it and said, "Wow! The sun has gone down. I guess its a sunset!"

1 comment:

  1. This looks like so much fun! I'm going to try it with my kids tomorrow!

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