EDIT 11/5/2012: We are no longer selling custom crayon pieces in our Etsy shop. We are now focusing on a new jewelry project, so please check that out and we hope you enjoy the tutorial below!

Edit: We are now selling custom crayon pieces in our Etsy shop! If you have questions about commissioning your own artwork, please see the shop or email us at lightandspoon@gmail.com.

Here’s our contribution to the melted crayon craze on Pinterest. My original inspiration was this one, though original source is apparently unknown, because I found it on Pinterest. Grumble. *Edit! Thank you to commenter SoKnitpicky, I have now seen the original “crayons through a glue gun” pin. Not much more to it than the picture, but she answers a lot of questions in the comments about how to make the crayons work in the gun.

Anyway! We wanted to put a little more of ourselves into it, literally. We started by taking a silhouette photo of ourselves, which Jeff traced on the lightbox and transferred to the canvas with pencil and tracing paper. (We were both smiling in the picture, which means we sort of don’t have lips in the silhouette. But I like it that way.)

He filled in in with marker, and then we taped some saran wrap around a piece of cardstock to make a run-off barrier for the top of the umbrella. Some more painter’s tape went over the silhouettes.

We pulled out all the blues and greys from three boxes we got on sale for $2.50 each at A.C. Moore. We only ended up using 19 crayons on this canvas, but used about 20 for practicing before the real thing. The canvas is a 18×24 “Econo” canvas that came in a 2-pack for $10, making this about a $7 project.

Then it was just a matter of putting the crayons through the gun–the pretty-but-stupid impulse-buy glue gun that barely works, so I didn’t ruin my good one. The wax got really drippy at times and splattered more than expected. Not sure if this is a high- or low-temp gun. Not sure if it matters.

The hardest part was removing the guard and fixing the wax around it. It involved some flame and an Xacto knife, plus a little fill-in with the marker.

Yay! We love how it turned out. This will probably go in the upstairs bathroom.



