Not-Your-Average Crayon Wall Art

I've seen a lot of crayon wall art going around Pinterest lately and it has appealed to the kid in me--and the mom who wants to get rid of bags and boxes of old, broken crayons.  I even saw a crayon art rendition around Halloween that involved melting them on a pumpkin that I thought the kids would love.  Then when I tried it, I realized that kids can't use glue guns (you have to attach the crayons first or the blow dryer will just blow them around), and holding a hair dryer over a crayon for five minutes to melt it completely was WAY above my 4-year-old's attention span limit.  FAIL.

So it has been on the back burner for a while.  Then I saw this picture on Pinterest, realized I had beadboard in my bedroom that I wasn't going to keep on the wall, and thought, "Wow! Free, large, wall-hanging."

As I was pondering what to do with my newly-removed bead-board, I struck on the idea to combine the two projects. I wasn't sure if it would work to melt crayons on bead-board, since there are grooves and such, but I decided to try it anyway.

I was going to do a tree shape because I like this print I found on Pinterest so much. I got out my crayons, my glue gun, some paint, and a hair dryer and went to work.

Look how great it turned out! I love it in the space; it does such a good job of pulling in the colors and filling up the wall--and it was free!  What could be better than that?

If you would like to see the process that I used to make it, keep reading.  If not--thanks for looking!

First, I cut the bead-board as square as I could, sanded down the holes where the nails had gone through it, and then gave it a quick coat of white spray paint to even it out.  Then decided I didn't want it white.  At the time, the dresser it was going to hang above was a dark brown color, so white would have looked great, but then I remembered that I wanted to paint the dresser white, so a large white dresser with a large white wall-hanging above it would have been a bit much.

A sky-blue background seemed appropriate, so I found all my acrylic craft paint and mixed up what I thought would be a good color.  Drizzling some on, I took out my brush and covered the whole thing with it.

When it dried, I realized that the color was WAY too dark, so first, I tried sanding some of the paint off.  This is what I got:

 It was lighter, and it had an interesting texture to it, so I decided to forge ahead.  It couldn't be that bad, right?  Using a knife and a cutting board, I cut my crayons into small round pieces, which I hot glued to the board.  Then I got out my hair dryer and held it about 1/2 an inch above my crayon pieces.  Each piece took a couple minutes to melt and spread, so just getting this far took me about an hour.  Then, for the trunks, I took a dark brown crayon, held it over a candle flame until it was melty and then dragged it on the bead-board.  I really like how this turned out.  It looked like tree bark because of the texture.  Then I went to bed.  In the morning, this is what it looked like:

And I didn't like it at all! The trunks looked great, but the leaves didn't stand out from the background enough, and the blue still looked darker than I wanted it.  I thought about scraping it all off and starting over, but even if that would work, it was more work than I wanted to do.  So I did the only thing a good DIYer could--I spray painted right over the top.

That's right! I took out my white spray paint, held it about a foot and a half from the board and sprayed the whole thing down.  I knew I was taking a risk.  It could ruin my creation even further, but I was desperate.  Thank goodness, when the paint dried, I liked it MUCH better!

I do suggest skipping this step and just painting it the right color the first time--before you add your crayon.  After the background was right, the rest was pretty easy.  I followed the first couple steps until I liked it.

I did make one minor adjustment to my workthrough after a while.  The hot glue worked like a charm, but it didn't melt when the crayon did, so it left a lump under the color.  That was fine for a little bit of texture, but I didn't want them all over.  So I started using the tip of my glue gun to melt the bottom of my crayon pieces and then stuck them to the board.  It was enough to keep them from being blow away (for the most part) and it didn't leave a glue lump at the end.

And there it is hanging on the wall in the girls' room.  A pretty quick project when you do it right the first time--and it was free!  I'm in love. :)