Solar Powered Art

During your travels through this magical series of tubes called the internet I'm sure that you, much like myself, have stumbled across this clever craft idea at least once. As a lover of all the super cheap craft stuff that can be found around back to school time and someone in need of things to start hanging on my walls this crayon art was right up my alley.

Only, unlike so many folks I decided to save some electricity and use our extremely sunny conditions to create the necessary heat for the project. I started out with two packages of Crayola crayons, an old canvas board and some glue. I removed one grey, one black and both white and brown crayons from the bunch and glued the crayons near the top of my canvas to create a double rainbow. I let the glue set overnight and stuck my canvas out in the early sunlight on my patio, propped up against a chair with some newspaper underneath to catch any drips.

I waited. And waited. I ran outside every so often to check on the progress and it was very anti-climatic until around the 2pm mark. Then it happened:

The purples and blues started first, in thin waxy drips then large chunks of built up mush as colors collided just outside the wrappers. The greens sat on the verge of dripped, glistening in the afternoon sun.

As they finally began to run the sun had left the patio and I took out the hairdryer to coax the remaining colors into movement. All it took was about three minutes and the yellows, oranges and reds joined the others on their journey down the canvas.

I let the wax solidify before bringing it in and hanging it up on my craft room wall. Eventually I would like to frame it, but for now I'm just enjoying the textures of it.

A fairly effortless and fun project that cost me less than $1. :)

P.S. I've been spending a lot of time on a site called Pinterest where I've been curating collections of lovely things, gathering ideas for things to make and hoarding inspiration. It's seriously addicting and I've been spending my snippets of time between reading, working, cooking and sleeping pinning things to my little heart's content. If you want to check out what the site is all about or friend me, you can find my pinboards here.